The van pulled up outside the flat at 8.02am, which I know because Matt had been standing at the window since twenty to eight with a mug in his hand and the face of a man waiting for exam results. It was Saturday 1 February, cold and dry, with a wind coming off the hill that I have since learned is simply what the hill does. The plan on my phone said: 8.00 van, 8.15 start, out of Crookes by 10, done by 1. The van was two minutes late and I felt oddly offended.
Loading in Crookes
We'd booked the £340 quote: two men, a 3.5-tonne Luton van, up to four hours, £60 for every extra hour. Fifty-eight boxes, a bed, a wardrobe, a desk, a sofa and a lot of things that were not boxes. Priya and Dan turned up at 8.15 with a bag of bacon rolls, which is the correct way to arrive at a house move. Kev came ten minutes later with the trailer hitched to his car and took the bikes, the houseplants and the garden bits, strapping it all down with the quiet satisfaction of a man who has waited years for someone to need his trailer.
Priya had put a strip of coloured tape on every box the night before, one colour per room, so the men could read the house without asking me. Nobody asked me anything for two hours. The wardrobe came down the flat's narrow stairs in three pieces and a good deal of vocabulary, and by 10.05 the shutter was down.
One hill, no parking
Our street is steep, lined with parked cars on both sides, and has no space big enough for a Luton van. The driver looked at it for a while and said, quite calmly, "I've done worse." Then he looked at it again. In the end he double-parked with the hazards on, a few metres below the house, and the whole move happened on a slope with the shutter up and a queue of cars behind us.
Jas from across the road moved his own car without being asked, which bought us another four metres and made him my friend for life. Maureen watched the first hour from her front window with a cup of tea. She didn't come out, but I'd say she was supervising.
Everything came off the van in a line, uphill, passed hand to hand like buckets at a fire. The men finished at 12.15pm, which was four hours and a quarter from the start. They didn't charge for the extra fifteen minutes, so I gave them £20 in cash, and a cup of tea each from the £22 kettle, drunk in the half-empty front room in our coats.
The two things that went wrong
The first was the sofa. It was bought in 2021 for £600 and had come up the flat's stairs without complaint. Matt had measured the front door the week before, carefully, but not the turn from the hall into the front room, which he'd eyeballed. The sofa went in, stopped, went back out, went in on its end, and stopped again.
Dan said it was a geometry problem. Matt said, with great dignity, "Measure twice, swear once", and then admitted he'd measured once. In the end four of us carried it round the back by the gennel and in through the back door, which added eleven minutes and a scrape to the paintwork.
The second was the bedding. I had put the box marked BEDDING at the front of the pile, which in practice meant the movers loaded it first, so it came off the van last, behind fifty-seven other boxes and the wardrobe. It reached the house at 12.10pm, and I had spent the whole morning planning my day around the moment I'd make the bed. We made it at one o'clock, in a room with no curtains, and I felt a pleasure out of all proportion to the achievement.
Pizza on the floor
Priya and Dan were paid in pizza, which we ate that evening on the floor of the front room, off the lids of the boxes they'd carried. The house was cold, because the heating timer was still set to somebody else's routine, so we ate in our coats. Kev stayed for one more tea after the trailer was empty and told Matt that the bikes had behaved themselves for the whole mile.
Brew count: 6.
