london house moving rfi

You should be able to hire a van with a driver.

yo people - i'm looking for a two-bedroom or a one-bedroom w/a garden.. hopefully in hackney? let me know if you know of anything.

bump

fucking hell this is the worst thing ever

- thought i'd found a place. in budget, with friends, in dalston. it was PERFECT. 90% mine. obv the 10% had to happen (current inhabitant's own plans fell through, and he hadn't officially committed to moving so is just gonna stay put. FUCK HIM)
- which meant that i missed my chance for a place i'd been thinking about before that, which was in peckham BUT super-cheap and including a swimming pool (!) and tennis court (!)
- another place in peckham looked absolutely perfect right up until i saw the actual bedroom, which was on a...mezzanine level above the living room that wasn't closed off
- lots of friends and friends-of-friends came through! some of the rooms looked fantastic! they were all mine if i wanted them! they were all waaaay over budget :(
- currently considering another friends-of-friends place: it looks pretty nice BUT a) someone else working from home - this does my head in, b) room doesn't include bed - really don't want to buy bed of own, c) when i went round to see it, the girl living there just casually started smoking in the living room - can't live with that, if they offer it to me i'll ask if this could change but with 3 strikes against the place...
- currently juggling countless emails fired off, places viewed, always aware i'm in competition with 943038323 other people :(

already having to use a stopgap place which means moving TWICE, in a month that's already ridiculously busy for me - that stopgap room is in the original house, is it ok to actually kill the guy who rescinded on moving out while i'm there? if i need a stopgap beyond those two weeks i have no fucking idea what i'll do. in fact i'm not sure what i'll end up doing when i have to move out given that i'm not going to be in london that weekend.

- another place in peckham looked absolutely perfect right up until i saw the actual bedroom, which was on a...mezzanine level above the living room that wasn't closed off

I think i might have been to this house. was there a serbian guy living or leaving there?

I've seen a house with a bedroom like that in Dalston as well - what goes through these architects' minds?

no serbian guy, though amusingly the previous inhabitant was a prominent figure in the anti-cuts activist movement

Quite cheap storage at that place in Stoke Newington if you're having to do multiple temporary moves. That's what situation I'm in now.

luckily the stopgap house has quite a bit of storage space but i've just made myself panic a bit thinking about how the fuck i'm going to cope with moving out of it on the weekend of the 18th (to where, who knows) when i won't be in london.

ugh if the original place had worked out everything would be so completely FINE right now and as it is it's a fucking mess.

i missed my chance for a place i'd been thinking about before that, which was in peckham

uhm thread is LONDON house moving

are there any mezzanine levels that are closed off?

uhhhhh so i'm meant to move house today, in 15 minutes, and the van man just rang to say he's got into an accident and can't come, and has no suggestions sorry. i have no other way of moving. can ilx help?

This whole thing sounds like a nightmare and a half :( I wd so help you if I was in the same country

twitter solved it!!

i tweeted that and for the first time ever typed "please rt" - within 10 minutes i had a ridiculous amount of suggestions and alternatives, one of which was a man with a van who was free at short notice. then the move itself was pain-free. never mind revolutions, twitter really does come into its own for last-minute domestic crises.

fucking hell why can't i just set fire to my possessions and take this move as the opportunity to develop an ascetic lifestyle.

do

Nearing this myself though wouldn't call what I'm aiming for ascetic, minimalist maybe

(PS lovely to meet you the other night merdeyeux!)

very nice meeting you too lex, on reflection i was probably a bit weird as i was in an odd state of euphoria masking fatigue (that masking effect lasted only about five minutes). journey through the light consistently does odd things to me.

my move is done and wow that went remarkably smoothly. didn't even have to destroy all of my possessions. lex (and anybody else) if you haven't booked any removal people yet i highly recommend steve at urban camel - http://theurbancamelcompany.co.uk/manandvan.html. cheap, efficient, very friendly, and good architecture, travel, etc. chat on the trip across london.

Where'd you move to?

Our landlord texted last week to say he wanted to come by and 'have a chat about the future' which made me spend part of the weekend fretting that we'd be evicted and have to move after four years of stability. It ended up being a 'rent review' though, up to 1000/month from July. Kind of depressing that a 75 pound/month rent increase can be considered a relief, but I would dread having to move again.

i took a casual ten mile trip down the road to tooting. now i live in an actual nice house instead of a decrepit dump, which i think mostly makes up for being less connected. (though i admit i'm not looking forward to my 90 minute night bus journeys home from nights out in hackney.)

oh that might be a very useful recommendation, thx - i had a number for a good man with a van but lost it.

i'm pretty much following you, moving to battersea - had had trepidation about leaving behind friends in hackney, nights out etc, then i realised everyone's moving south anyway, and the nights out will probably follow.

(disco weirdness all natural, i'm sure it applied to me too)

what do people DO with random old phones, cables, hard drives that have been lying around in drawers for years? just...throw them away? or is there something greener i am meant to be doing

Last time I moved I just chucked the lot, but then I had six years' worth of accumulated shit and no time or patience.

cool i just wanted absolution!

*throws everything away*

your council probably has bins for electronics throughout the borough where you can dump that stuff for recycling if you want to be greenish about it

There's one on Green Lanes by Clissold Park, near the corner with Church Street, but there is bound to be one closer to you.

holy shit @ lex moving south

i suppose it's natural/inevitable, fucking HACKNEY, FUCK THIS SHIT

Lex may be moving but one of the buses that passes my centrally located palace bound to/from Battersyah stops pretty much where the east/west buses do.

there are some amazing buses out there

there is about 3 square metres of dead or inutile electronics on the floor in a corner of one of my rooms including a gordian knot of computer cables, power cables and early 2000s phone chargers, half a dozen dead or possibly dead laptop dvdrws, a late 90s laser printer, corrupted hard drives, variform towers and citadels comprising of books and jewel cases of ancient cdrs and dvdrs in states of discolouration and digital maculation that form a maginot line against roomba incursion, then in the living room three broken lamps and three laptop lcd screens, ive been intending to trash or ebay this tat for ages ever since my cleaner moved away and this and endless paper gradually accumulated and formed a de facto alternative to the cherished culture-objects that ordinarily flesh out the voids of lived spaces

holy shit @ lex moving south

almost everyone i know in east has moved or is soon moving south this year. at first i had trepidation because i've lived east for virtually my entire time in london and have grown very attached to hackney but walking around the other day i realised that's not really the case any more

Realizing a neighborhood has changed long after it has is a strange feeling - like you've known for a long time but didnt want to think about it just yet

it's funny b/c i knew when i moved to lower clapton over two years ago that it was on the brink of change but it happened so rapidly. there was a point at which it was perfect and that lasted for about a month before tipping into full-blown gentrification

otm

i highly recommend steve at urban camel - http://theurbancamelcompany.co.uk/manandvan.html. cheap, efficient, very friendly, and good architecture, travel, etc. chat on the trip across london.

― Merdeyeux, Tuesday, March 18, 2014 7:17 PM (1 week ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

SECONDED on every point!

✓

solicitor asking for 10% deposit to be deposited in his firm's account ASAP. (our target date is 28 april).

normal? feels weird handing over such a chunk of change to someone who's neither the current owner nor the bank.

Will ask my friend J if that's the done thing but you'll have to wait until he's here (say at 5pm).

That's normal. They're the ones who send the money over to the seller at the precise moment the contract requires (I think it's supposed to reassure you that the seller won't run off with the deposit or something. It felt more like an extra step to go wrong ime). It seems a little early to be doing it but maybe they're just wary of delays.

normal

I love how you all keep talking about "moving South" like you're Orcadians talking about "South" as this mythical place where people drop off the face of the earth.

I was "South" when "South" wasn't cool hahaha.

south still isn't cool afaik

South is cool coz South doesn't care if you think South is cool or not.

south still isn't cool afaik

Poor Tracer.

northerners clinging onto their fading coolness, very sad to see.

They gotta justify the expense of staying up there somehow!

Bloomsbury will never, ever be un-cool (apart from that one block BB haaaaaaaaates). It will be even cooler when I refurbish my flat and put my own dog in it.

I've done my time in Hackney and Peckham and thereabouts as a very early adopter, but that was 20/25 years ago, and all those places motivated me to do was to move to Primrose Hill/Hampstead/Camden etc.

Bloomsbury will never, ever be un-cool again

^^^fixed your post, babe! x

There was nothing wrong with it, babe.

Haha!

'Cool' is part of the whole fucking problem, we're not at the stage of £500k ex-council maisonettes in Peckham yet but we will be before too long.

I've done my time in Hackney and Peckham and thereabouts as a very early adopter

You know there have been people living in these places for hundreds of years right? Even some middle class people.

Thanks for pointing that out, Captain Obvious - no idea what I'd do if you weren't here to single me out above all these people newly daring to venture to the uncouth South ;-)

I may be overly sensitive about phrases like "early adopter" having read my hundredth or so smug property section type article beginning along the lines "until recently this place was just another outpost of Zone Whatever but now buyers are really waking up to it". I find this sort of Evening Standard guff incredibly disrespectful to the communities that have lived there all along, the subtext being that parts of London are far-flung wildnernesses just waiting to be colonised by the people who matter. You only need to look at Hackney to see what happens then.

(FWIW this is not to call out any of the house movers ITT, I know you have your own personal reasons for moving)

Sorry. I have been hanging out with people from Orkney too much, and it's just every time people say "South" I hear it in that accent ("Sooth") and when Orcadians say "Sooth" they could mean Inverness or they could mean Glasgow or Manchester or London or France, or, basically anywhere in the world that isn't Orkney is just one giant blank spot labelled "Sooth". It's just amusing to mix these two usages.

(I do know exactly the attitude you're talking about, though, DC.)

Wondering how this flat is doing now and if its got central heating. I really liked the look they'd achieved:

http://www.independent.co.uk/property/interiors/interiors-golden-oldies-794190.html

Poor Tracer.

― Tim, Wednesday, April 2, 2014 11:49 AM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

that wasn't a slam!! if anything it's the opposite; i have this unexpectedly sublime feeling about my move out of coolness, about having no cool cafes near me. maybe this is just me getting old, i dunno.

urban camel guy says we have too much stuff :(

anybody have a recommendation for someone who can move a 2-bed flat?

i found some people to move our stuff :D

exchanged contracts today :D :D :D :D

moving on april 25th!!

the fences on both sides of my new backyard have collapsed :(

solicitor has still not written to say exactly what money we need to send where.....

Where are you moving to? I totally missed this part.

i'm moving out of my home of ten years(!) in august, from stoke newington to angel. Anyone have a man and van recommendation? Urban Camel guy seems to have gone off the grid :(

this is also relevant to my interests

i moved recently and my friend recommended a man with van - he was good, helped me move, was quick, friendly, had a decent-sized van. happy to share his details. the only strange bit was when i asked how much he said "it is up to you".

i gave him a sum which was prob more towards the generous side but i'm sure you could arrange beforehand.

theyellowvancompany.com have served me well on multiple occasions

not tried vangirls.co.uk but probably worth considering if north

ah this is great, thanks! i feel like pay what you like would make me pay way over the odds out of guilt though..

yeah that's kind of what happened me. a friend recommended him and he didn't do this with my friend. i guess it was about 90 minutes work very early on a saturday and i gave him £100. he did help with packing and unpacking so i kinda felt fair enough, the move was way quicker for his involvement.

tbf most of the people I've looked at are 2 hours minimum at ~£60/hour, so you didn't totally rip yourself off

ah fair enough, damn, maybe i lowballed him!