Packing your Home before a House Clearance

Posted on 28/10/2020

How to Packing your Home before a House Clearance

If you are downsizing to a much smaller home or are relocating to another country or city, then you may find that most of the stuff in your home needs to be gotten rid of. If this is the situation that you have found yourself in then you may not know where to start, do you pack first, do you clear your home first?

What you decide to do will greatly depend on whether you intend on employing the services of a House Clearance Company. If you intend to get some outside help then it will be best for you to pack first, make sure all of the things that you want to move to your new property are secured in boxes and are ready to be moved. Then the house clearance company will have free reign to go into your home and get rid of absolutely everything. If you are going to clear your home yourself, without using a clearance company then it is completely up to you how you decide to do it, you can either pack away the things you want to keep first, or you can clear and pack at the same time.

To pack your home ready for the move you will need to have the following materials:

• Boxes, cardboard boxes will suffice for the majority of your things, however, you might want to think about buying some plastic boxes that will offer your things more protection. Boxes are available in a range of different shapes and sizes, for example there are wardrobe boxes available now that enable you to transport the entire contents of your wardrobe without having to fold up and crease your clothes.

• Protective wrapping, such as bubble wrap and/or packaging cling film, things that you will need to use to wrap delicate items to protect them during the move, and to cover things like mirrors and furniture so that they don’t get scratched.

• Foam peanuts should be used to fill up any additional space inside the box to prevent the things inside your box from moving around and banging into one another, furthermore, these foam peanuts will take the impact from any blows, bumps and bangs the box sustains during transit.

• Labelling equipment, this includes marker pens so that you can note the contents of what is inside the box. You should also consider buying stickers, such a ‘Fragile’ and ‘this way up’ stickers to place on boxes.

• Strong packaging tape that you can use to seal and strengthen boxes.

When you have boxed up everything you wish to take with you, you simply need to clear out the rest, if you are using a house clearance company this will be relatively straight forward for you, and the company will even arrange disposing of the things you don’t want for you. If you are going to be clearing the house yourself then you should sort through everything and separate them into the following piles:

• Store: this should include everything you want to keep but can’t, all of this should be placed into storage until you are able to store it in your home.

• Sell: if you want to try to make some money back from your house clearance you should consider selling all of the things you don’t want or use but are in good condition and someone else might want.

• Donate: anything you don’t want that is in good condition can be donated to a local charity shop.

• Recycle: up to 90% of your rubbish can be recycled.

• Throw away: this is anything that doesn’t fit into one of the above categories. Use a licenced waste disposal centre.