House moves
House removals in Dover, done properly.
A whole house is the move where the small decisions add up — which van, how many of us, what order it loads in, and whether the street will take a lorry at all. We settle those before the morning, not during it.
Dover housing is more varied than a town this size has any right to be. There are the Victorian and Edwardian terraces climbing the hills either side of the valley. There is the town centre with flats over shops. There are the post-war estates at Buckland and Tower Hamlets, the newer building out at Whitfield, and then the seafront and the cliff-top properties with views you pay for in stairs.
Each of those is a different job. We price them as such.
What the day includes
Protection down first — floors, door frames, bannisters, at both ends. Furniture dismantled where it needs to be. Everything blanketed and wrapped before it goes near a doorway. Loaded in an order that makes the unload sensible rather than fast. Then driven, carried in, and put where you actually want it.
- Full packing, part packing, or just the fragile end of it
- Wardrobe cartons so hanging clothes stay on the hanger
- Dismantle and reassemble of beds, wardrobes and tables
- Pictures, mirrors, glass and TVs boxed rather than blanket-wrapped
- Boxes labelled by room so unloading is not a guessing game
- Storage if the chain moves and the dates stop lining up
The Dover access problem
It is worth being blunt about this because it is the thing that catches out firms from further inland. A lot of Dover streets are narrow, steep, one-way, or all three. Parking is on-street and contested. Some of the roads above the town have a gradient that makes a loaded tail-lift genuinely awkward, and a few have no realistic place to stop a large vehicle at all.
None of that stops us. It just decides the vehicle and the crew size, and it is exactly why we want a look at the street beforehand. Where the big van cannot get near, we shuttle. It adds time and we will say so in the quote rather than discovering it on the day and looking surprised.
If the house is going abroad
A fair number of Dover house moves do not end in Kent. If yours is carrying on to France or further, the packing standard changes and the paperwork starts early — that is covered on cross-channel removals. For a flat rather than a house, see flat removals, and for a single room or a part load, man and van is usually the better fit.
House move questions
- Do you survey before quoting a house?
- Yes, and for most houses a video walk-round is enough. It takes twenty minutes and it stops the quote moving on the day. We are looking at volume, the awkward pieces, and how we get in and out at both ends.
- Our street is on the hill and there is nowhere to park.
- That describes a good part of Dover. The streets climbing up from the front were built before anyone owned a car, let alone a Luton. We check the street, apply for a bay suspension where one exists, and where nothing will fit we shuttle from the nearest legal stopping point with a smaller van.
- Can you move us on the same day we complete?
- Normally, yes — load in the morning, wait for the keys, unload in the afternoon. Where the release runs late we will talk to you about the load staying secured on the vehicle overnight rather than leaving you with furniture on the pavement.
- Do you dismantle furniture?
- Beds, standard wardrobes, table legs — yes, and we keep the fixings with the piece. Older or unusual furniture we look at first; some of it is safer moved whole and wrapped than taken apart.
- What if the house is bigger than we said?
- We would rather find out at survey. If the volume on the day is genuinely different from what was surveyed we will tell you before we start loading and explain what changes, rather than adding it quietly at the end.
Get a house move quoted
Two addresses and a rough idea of what is going is enough to start. If it is heading out through the port, say where it is landing.