Anyone who has bought or sold a home in the UK knows the feeling: the removal van is booked, the boxes are packed, and then a call comes in. The buyer's mortgage offer is late, a survey needs redoing, or someone further up the chain has pulled out. Suddenly the date you planned your life around has moved, and the contents of your home still need to be somewhere.
This situation is far more common than most people expect. Research from Barclays, reported by Which, found that nearly a third of property transactions involve a chain, and almost half of the people in those chains experience delays or a collapsed sale. Those who ran into problems spent an average of over £2,000 extra on their move.
You can't control every link in a chain. What you can control is whether a delay turns into a scramble for somewhere to put your furniture.
There are a few common ways the dates stop lining up:
• You've completed on your sale but your purchase hasn't completed yet, leaving you with a house to vacate and nowhere to move into
• You're buying a new-build, where completion dates often shift as construction finishes
• A chain collapses and you decide to proceed with your sale anyway, then search for your next home afterwards
• You're renting temporarily while you find the right property, in a smaller place that can't hold everything you own
In each case the problem is the same: your belongings have nowhere to go for a few days, a few weeks, or sometimes a few months, and nobody can tell you exactly how long.
The usual first plan is to ask a relative or friend for space. It works for a weekend, but it gets awkward quickly when the delay stretches out. Garages can be damp, spare rooms fill up, and it's hard to keep asking for more time when you can't give a firm end date. There's also the risk of damage to furniture, which is stressful to deal with when it's someone else's property it happened in.
A storage unit gives you a dry, secure, private space that's entirely yours for exactly as long as the delay lasts. For a house move in particular, it helps in a few practical ways:
• It lets you complete your sale on time, even if your next home isn't ready, because the contents of your house have somewhere to go
• You can keep access to your belongings, so you can retrieve things you unexpectedly need during the gap, such as seasonal clothes, paperwork or children's items
• There's no pressure to rush into a rental or a purchase you aren't sure about just to have somewhere to put your furniture
• You can pay for the time you actually need, rather than guessing at a date that may well change
That last point matters most. When you don't know how long the gap will be, a flexible arrangement is far more useful than a fixed one.
Since you may need to come and go during the gap, a few features make a real difference:
• Round-the-clock access, because moves rarely run to office hours and a last-minute change of date shouldn't mean waiting until Monday
• Drive-up access, so loading and unloading furniture from a van or car is quick and doesn't involve carrying a sofa down corridors
• Flexible contracts with no long minimum term, so you can leave the day your new home is ready
• Good security, including CCTV, a manned site and controlled access, since a whole household's contents is a significant amount of value
• Pack with the end in mind: put the items you'll need first in your new home in a separate section of the unit, near the door, so they come out first
• Keep a short list of what's in each box, as it saves time when you need to retrieve something mid-move
• Keep essentials, important documents and valuables with you rather than in storage
• Book your unit as soon as exchange of contracts looks likely, so it's one less thing to arrange when dates move
You can't make a chain move faster, but you can stop it from dictating where your furniture ends up. At Pickups Self Storage in Pudsey, we offer flexible, secure units with drive-up access and 24/7 site access, so a delay on the house side doesn't have to become a crisis on the logistics side.
Take a look at our self storage options to see the unit sizes available, or ask for a quote and we'll help you choose a size that suits your move. If your completion date is still uncertain, our team can talk through flexible short-term storage options so you're covered whichever way the dates fall.
11 months ago