Skip Rental Tips for a Good Move
If you’re moving and need to rent a truck and/or helpers, don’t pay full price. There’s a way to get the same service for about half the cost. Cheapest skip bin hire Adelaide is the only solution for you to avoid over spending.
The most expensive part of most moves is labor. The movers will spend an hour packing one box and ten minutes packing ten boxes. If you pack the boxes yourself, the movers will spend one hour moving ten boxes and ten minutes moving one box. And that’s just when they’re moving your stuff; when they’re unloading things from the truck, they’ll do it in a tenth of the time you would take, even if you were using a fork-lift and they were using their fingers and toes.
When you move yourself, or with friends or family members who don’t expect to be paid, you are limiting your costs to transportation costs and any remaining boxes and materials. But if you hire movers, their hourly rate is going to be the largest part of your costs.
Every time I move, one of the first things I do is go to U-Haul or Budget or some other rent-a-truck company and buy a truck. I am not alone; every time I mention this to someone, they say “Oh yeah, me too.”
So why do all these people who are moving also have trucks? Because it helps them get out of their old place faster. If you have a truck, you can just load up everything, take it to your new place, and then unpack it. If you don’t have a truck, you have to schedule movers at both ends. You might wait days for a moving van or days for the truck rental.
As long as you are going to be paying for the truck anyway, why not use it to help with your move? It saves time and money. You can hire movers at both ends without having to pay them for two days.
When you move, there is a big temptation to handle the job yourself. You may know that it will take a long day and cost a lot in moving supplies, but it’s easy to underestimate how much work you’re going to have to do.
Like every other kind of work, moving is best done when you have the right equipment for the job. If you try to move without a truck or a van, you’ll spend all your time loading and unloading stuff from one vehicle to another. A friend of mine who was trying to save money decided he’d move from his apartment by himself, using a pickup truck and a homemade wooden platform. He didn’t have enough help, so he had to cut corners. The result was that he had no place for his stuff when he got home; all the furniture had been piled in the center of his apartment.
With a truck, at least your furniture can stay put while you load up boxes and bags of clothes and supplies. But there are still more things you need: straps or bungee cords or rope so that things don’t slide around on top of the truck; packing materials like bubble wrap and moving blankets so that nothing gets scratched or dented; tools so that you can take apart some furniture if you have.
When you’re moving, it’s easy to be seduced into renting equipment. You’ll think you need it because you don’t want to waste time or money, and the rental place will work hard to convince you that their equipment is better than yours.
You may well be right about this; the equipment they rent is better than what most people own. But if you are like most people, you can make do with equipment that is not as good. The main reason is that the best way to move heavy furniture is to carry it, not drag it.
Lugging furniture around is something everyone should know how to do
Let me give an analogy. Suppose one day I wake up and decide I want to play tennis. I go down to the local club, and they encourage me to buy some lessons first, maybe even try out some nice new racquets they have for sale there. At first I’m resistant; after all, I’d never played before, but they insist it will be worth the investment. Maybe so, but there’s also a free option: at lunchtime I can just go out behind the building and start hitting balls against the wall with whatever two-handed racket I happen to find there. The best skip bin hire can be found near you.
