Top tips for moving house

Put the kettle, a few mugs and your tea making supplies in a separate box and clearly label it. When you need a well earned break you don't want to have to be digging through boxes to find these essential items.

When you've got everything into your new place, assemble your bed before you do anything else. Moving is exhausting, and you'll be glad you did this when you decide you've had enough and it's there waiting for you to collapse on.

Treat yourself to a takeaway. If there's one time you deserve a takeaway, moving day is it. If you're moving to a new area it's worth looking up what options there are beforehand.

Spread out heavy items like books over several boxes with lighter things in the top, otherwise you could end up with one box that's impossible to lift!

Use sturdy boxes or plastic crates and avoid using boxes that are too big as they may be awkward for one person to easily lift. Plastic crates are the best (and our favourite) because they stack really easily and you can put them on top of each other in any order without worrying about anything getting squashed. Don't trust the handles! Many cardboard boxes have handles on the sides, but it's usually best to hold boxes from the bottom just in case, especially if they've been used before. Office archive boxes are a popular choice for moving, but these boxes are generally quite weak and we've seen more than one customer end up with fragile items smashed on the floor because the bottom gave out. This can also be true with folding plastic crates if you put too many heavy things in them.

Rope in some friends or family to help. Even if you hire two movers to help you, it's still good to have extra pairs of hands especially if the place you're moving in to is up a few flights of stairs. If for example you are moving onto a fourth floor, if you have four people you can move things upstairs in relay doing one floor each. Beleive us it's much less tiring climbing one flight of stairs 20 times than climbing four flights 20 times! The only downside to this is that you will probably have to help them when they move!

Before you move, think about whether any furniture you want to move was built in the room where it lives. This is quite a common problem with flat-pack wardrobes, where once they are constructed they won't go out of the room whole, and it's easy to forget if it's a long time since you bought it.