There is always one more box. You have loaded everything, you are sure that you have. Then, just as you are about to set off on your journey to your new home, someone appears at the front door with a bin bag full of stuff that they have found in a cupboard under the stairs. It’s not bad luck, it’s arithmetic.
Removal companies have long known that there is an element of mathematics involved in working out how much space a house will take up. And so for many years they have used the ‘bedroom method’ as a rough guide to sizing the required vehicles. The basis of the bedroom method is to count the number of bedrooms in a house, and then to estimate the volume of the remaining rooms on a rough per room basis – typically between 3 and 6 cubic meters per room.
Part of the problem is physical and part is psychological. For instance, a fully packed wardrobe appears to weigh next to nothing, yet occupies a massive 1m3 of space on removals vans. On the other hand, flat-packed goods are extremely dense whereas large items of furniture, such as sofas, are mostly air with a small amount of fabric dressed over them. So, whereas removal men are thinking in terms of volume, most people are thinking in terms of weight and of how many items they think they have. See also Removal Company Cheltenham.
The underestimation of how much stuff people have is a well known psychological phenomenon. The vast majority of a person’s belongings are hidden from view within their home. Behind closed doors and in cupboards and loft spaces that haven’t been visited since the last time they moved, there are boxes and more boxes. It is not until everything is pulled out of storage and surveyed that the true extent of a person’s possessions is revealed. A reputable removals company in Cheltenham will send a surveyor to carry out a full inventory of a home’s contents before providing a quote. The British Association explains how removal surveys are supposed to work
The final box that won’t fit is not a failure to plan again but the moment when the hidden arithmetic is revealed.
