[Originally written April 2022 -JHM]
It’s commonly reported that “moving” or “la demenagement” is among the most stressful events for consumers, c.f. “Americans find moving more stressful than divorce”.
What are the essential difficulties involved in moving? Here we assume we are moving a residential home.
Moving is labour intensive, involving hands-on moving of numerous boxes, furniture (tables, couches, bedsets, dressers), and fragile items (TVs, mirrors, lamps).
Moving items is highly constrained, often involving heavy items being securely extracted from dwellings, and all this with zero damage to walls or floors.
Another difficulty, perhaps unappreciated by the clients, is the necessity of packing the objects into the moving truck.
This is a type of entropy problem, since the compressed volume of the moving truck restricts the possible range of motions of the objects. Moving requires alot of work and foresight to efficiently pack all the items securely in a truck.
Another view of the entropy difficulty is this: a house has many rooms, with the objects distributed sparsely throughout the space. However in a moving truck, all the objects need to be compressed into a single room (namely the box of the truck).
Can the clients estimate the volume of all their objects?
Is it possible for them to imagine all the objects to be relocated into a single room?
There is considerable stress involved in the action of, say, extracting heavy expensive “precious” furniture through various stairwells, corners, basements, etc.. The business of last-minute kijiji moving is even more stressful, for the clients are typically totally unprepared. For example, they might be selling a freezer located in the basement of a townhouse, with a very tight spiral staircase, and the client has arranged for its delivery to another basement appartment. The client might be moving their entire household, or only moving this single item. Or the client has received a new treadmill, and require its transport into the basement.
Building codes and standard construction methods make the extraction and deliveries somewhat easier. However extreme furniture pieces often push the movers ingenuity to the extreme, and requires alot of experience to immediately know which precise “furniture ballet” is required. As a rule of thumb : if an object makes three points of contact with the wall/floor/ceiling, then the object cannot be pushed any further without causing damage to the surroudings.
So how can the consumer save money when moving?
The answer is basically preparation.
To save money on moving: order a very large truck to make the loading and offloading easier, and pack as much as possible in regular cardboard boxes. This cannot be overremphasized: as much as possible, all the irregular objects should be packed into boxes, and into as many boxes as necessary.
Why?
Because it’s expensive for the movers to waste their time in arranging and sometimes rearranging irregular shapes objects into the truck.
The client should dissessemble the furniture as much as possible beforehand. Otherwise the movers need to spend working hours on the assembly/disassembly of furniture, and/or the preparation of more fragile objects.
Another difficulty is the patience and time required to safely move objects in tight spaces. For example, let us consider IKEA items which are very popular. One of the keys to IKEA’s business model is that their furniture is transported and sold totally disassembled, and neatly packing into boxes. I think it’s evident that tables and dressers dissassembled in boxes is more convenient for transport than fully assembled! In IKEA the consumer is required to read the instructions to assemble their items.
Another important constraint in domestic moves is: what is the pathway from the pickup to the truck, then from the truck to the dropoff. These are the environmental factors. Is the client moving in/out of a 20 storey building? Are we moving everything through elevators and long hallways? Is the client moving in/out of a basement? How many stairs? How close can the truck get to the unit?
Now IKEA and movers are not compatible. For the movers might not be able to move IKEA items in their assembled state. Why? Because the IKEA items are fragile, and not designed to be moved. However IKEA items are also not easily disassembled without causing damage (typically cosmetic) to the items. Therefore movers are typically required to transport IKEA items “as is”, and this is a challenge. For assembled IKEA items have no strength, and are not at all designed for “strongman” transport.
Now for all the complicated parameters that exist in moving, in this article our goal is to reduce everything to the simplest variables. Basically, if a client calls and wants to move their entire household, and wants to have an estimate (or the moving manager wants an estimate for their own schedule), then we ask the following questions:
When is the last time the client has moved their household?
If appplicable, ask how long it took and how many “human labour hours” were required for their last move?
How many “bedrooms” are now being moved?
(Basic logistics: pickup and dropoff addresses).
What kind of heavy items? (Fridges, couches, exercises equipment, etc.).
We make some comments: If the client is only moving a select number of items, then ask client “how did the item get here, how many persons were involved, how long did it take”.
Question 1. gives a lower bound (“a floor”) for the moving manager. Our experience is that people only accumulate items, even more items, after they move. When persons are settled in a location, then they collect more and more diverse items. This always adds to the time required and increases the complexity. Question 2. gives some idea, for example was it a team of four movers or two? Was it a big truck, or a smaller cube truck? Were there any incidents during that last move, particular events or damages to the items?
Question 2. is applicable only if the client can remember the last time the item was moved. However it does help manage the clients expectations.
Question 3. is important, especially for single persons who have recently moved themselves. For every single person, there is required approximately 6 to 10 total labour hours required. I.e. two movers require approximately 3 to 5 hours to move a single person (bachelor). This is large interval, which really determines on the particular circumstances. Heavy objects can take 15 – 30 minutes per item to move per team of two.
Questions 4, 5 are rather standard. Some estimate of the travel time and circumstances is necessary. For example, if the clients are located in an appartment building, then there is frequently a large walking distance required, and if there is an elevator involved, then the time can be much longer.
[End –JHM]