If you are still packing the night before, this article is too late to help much — pack, get some sleep, and read the walk-through section.
If you are not, the evening before a move has three jobs and none of them involve a tape gun. Done properly it takes about two hours and removes most of the ways a move day starts badly.
The box that rides in your car
Call it the essentials box, the first-night bag, whichever. The defining feature is not what is in it — it is that it does not go on the truck. It goes in your vehicle, or beside you on a flight.
What earns a place in it:
- Medication for everyone, plus several days' margin, and anything refrigerated in a cooler.
- Glasses, hearing aids, chargers and cables for every device in the household.
- Documents — identification, passports, the lease or completion paperwork, insurance papers, the move paperwork itself.
- A change of clothes each, plus something to sleep in.
- Toothbrushes, toothpaste, soap, a towel per person, toilet paper. The new place has none of these and the shops close.
- Kettle, two mugs, tea or coffee, a spoon. A hot drink in an empty flat at 9 p.m. does more for morale than it should.
- One set of sheets and pillowcases, so a bed can be made before anyone is too tired to make it.
- Snacks and water for the day itself. Nobody remembers to eat on a move day.
- A phone, a laptop and a charger if you have to work tomorrow.
- Keys — for the old place, for the new one, and for whatever they hand over at completion.
- Some cash, and a card that is not packed.
Put it in the car tonight. Not by the door — in the car. An unmarked box near a doorway on move-day morning is exactly the box a crew loads in good faith, because it looks like everything else.
Confirm where the truck will sit
More move days lose their first hour to parking than to anything else, and it is entirely avoidable.
At the address you are leaving:
- Is there a driveway or a bay that will take a truck, and is it clear? Move your own cars tonight, not in the morning.
- If it is street parking, are there time limits, permit zones or a school run that closes the street?
- If it is a building, has the loading bay been reserved, and for what window?
At the address you are going to:
- The same questions, plus the lift booking if there is one.
- Has the building received the insurance certificate it asked for? Buildings routinely refuse to release a service lift without it, and that conversation at 8 a.m. is unwinnable.
- Is there a move-in window? Buildings, residences and managed communities often have fixed hours, and arriving outside them means waiting.
A truck circling for a spot costs the same as a truck working. Ten minutes of phone calls tonight is the cheapest hour of the move.
The fridge and freezer pass
Do this tonight, not tomorrow.
- Eat, give away or discard fresh food. Produce does not travel.
- Condiments and open jars — into a cooler if you truly want them, into the bin if you are honest.
- Frozen food goes in a cooler with ice packs and only if the journey is short. Anything longer, do not risk it.
- Do not unplug the fridge tonight. Unplug it a couple of hours before the crew arrives so it drains and dries out. A fridge loaded wet arrives smelling of it.
- Wedge the door slightly open once it is off and empty, and tape the cord to the back so nobody trips on it.
Same principle for anything with fuel in it: drain the mower and the strimmer, and set propane cylinders aside entirely — they do not travel on a moving truck and they need separate disposal or transport.
The twenty-minute walk
Walk every room with a torch. Not a glance — a walk. You are looking for the things that are technically not in a room.
- Hooks, high shelves and the top of every wardrobe
- Every cupboard, including the ones you are certain are empty
- Behind and under beds, sofas and appliances
- The loft hatch, the crawl space, the meter cupboard
- The garage, the shed, the side passage
- Curtains, rails, blinds and light fittings that are coming with you
- The garden — furniture, tools, planters, the barbecue
- Anything attached to a wall that you intend to take: brackets, mounts, a mirror, a shelf
Twenty minutes tonight is the difference between a clean handover and a drive back to an empty house on Saturday for a box of shoes.
Set up the morning itself
Small things that make the first hour work:
- Confirm the crew's arrival window and check you have a number that reaches someone on the day.
- Clear the route inside the house — nothing loose in hallways, rugs rolled and out of the way, doors that swing wedged open.
- Put the essentials box in the car, if you have not already.
- Charge everything. Your phone will be the most-used object of the day.
- Decide the placement plan at the other end and write it on one sheet: which room each label maps to, and where the bed goes.
- Arrange the children and the animals. Both are safer and happier elsewhere, and both slow a crew down enormously — not because they are in the way, but because doors are open all day.
- Take meter readings and photographs of every room once it is empty tomorrow, but decide tonight that you will.
What to leave out for the crew
Do not pack these until the crew has gone:
- The kettle, mugs and a bit of milk
- Toilet paper and hand soap
- A roll of tape and a marker for the inevitable last carton
- Cleaning supplies for the final wipe-down
- The vacuum, which is nearly always the last thing to load
The short version
Tonight: the box goes in the car, the parking is confirmed at both ends, the fridge is emptied but still running, and every cupboard has been opened once by someone holding a torch.
Do those four and the morning is a matter of opening the door. If you want the full run of what happens once the truck arrives, residential moving walks through the day itself.