The crew pulls away around six. Here is the order the next eighteen hours run in, and what has to be done before anybody is tired enough to stop.
The first night box is the one thing you open before anything else, and this guide is about what happens after you open it. Our crews leave a typical house move somewhere between five and six in the evening. From that moment you are on your own in an unfamiliar building with a hundred cartons and no idea where the stopcock is. What follows is the running order of those next eighteen hours, in the sequence we would do it in ourselves.
It is deliberately not another packing list. If you want the contents of the box itemised — all twenty-five things, kettle downwards — that sits on our essential moving day survival kit guide. This page assumes the box is already packed and sitting in the boot of your car, and picks up at the point where the tailgate goes down and the lorry pulls away.
Arrival is not the moment to start opening things. It is the moment to decide where things go, because every carton a crew puts in the wrong room is a carton you carry twice. Walk the house before the tailgate opens, put a sheet of paper on every door with the room name written on it in marker, and match those names to whatever is written on the cartons. Ten minutes of that saves an hour of shuffling later, and the crew will thank you for it because they are the ones carrying.
Three things come off first and stay accessible: the bed parts, the vacuum cleaner, and your own first night box out of the car. Everything else can be stacked. Ask the crew to keep a walkway clear from the front door to the kitchen and to the foot of the stairs — cartons stacked into a corridor on arrival are the reason people trip carrying a mattress at eight in the evening.
The first useful act in the new house is not unpacking, it is checking. Before the crew has finished, walk each room with the inventory and look for the things that only show up once furniture is standing in place: a wardrobe door that will not open because it is against the radiator, a bed that has been built the wrong way round, a sofa in the room you meant it to be in but facing the wall. Furniture is easy to shift while four trained people are still on site and nearly impossible after they have gone. The full running order of the day itself is set out in our what happens on moving day guide.
The last thing before they leave: sign the paperwork, note anything damaged in writing rather than mentioning it, and take the crew leader’s name. Claims are straightforward when a note exists on the day and awkward when the first record of a problem is an email three weeks later. Our terms and insurance details explain how that works in practice.
This is the single piece of advice from this page that we would keep if we had to throw the rest away. Make every bed up, properly, while the crew is still in the building. Not later. Not after supper. While there are still people on site who can move a bed frame six inches to the left.
The reason is partly practical and partly not. Practically, beds are the last thing anyone wants to assemble at ten at night, the fixings are in a small bag that will have gone missing by then, and a mattress carried up a strange staircase in the dark is how people hurt their backs. Our crews build beds as standard on a full removal and will put the bedding on if you ask — mention it at survey and have the bedding out of the car rather than buried in a carton. If you have booked a full packing service, the bedding is usually in a clearly marked carton for exactly this reason.
The other reason is that a made bed changes what the house feels like. A family that walks into a bedroom at eleven at night and finds a duvet, pillows and a lamp goes to sleep. A family that finds a bare frame and a stack of boxes has a bad night and a worse day two. If there are children in the house this matters more, not less: their room gets made up first, with their own bedding and whatever they sleep with, before anybody touches the kitchen. Our moving house with children guide covers the rest of that evening.
Same logic for pets. Set up the bed, the bowls and the litter tray in one closed room early, put something that smells of the old house in there, and leave the animal in it while the front door is open. The moving with pets guide goes further, but the headline is that the first night is when animals bolt.
Every house has four things you need to be able to find in the dark, and in an unfamiliar house you will not find any of them in the dark. Do it in daylight on day one, write down where they are, and photograph each one.
The stopcock. The internal water shut-off. Usually under the kitchen sink, sometimes in a downstairs cloakroom, occasionally under the stairs or beneath a floor hatch in a hallway. Turn it, both ways, while you are standing there — a stopcock that has not moved since 1998 seizes, and the night a washing machine hose lets go is a bad time to discover it. There is also an external stop tap under a small metal cover at the boundary; find that too. In older Sussex stock, particularly converted properties, the internal stopcock is sometimes in a neighbouring flat, which is worth knowing before you need it.
The consumer unit. The fuse board. Under the stairs, in the porch, in the garage, above the front door in a purpose-built flat. Open it, look at whether the circuits are labelled, and if they are not, label them yourself over the next week by tripping each one and walking round. Check there is an RCD and that the test button works. A house where the previous owner never labelled the board is a house where you will be standing on a chair with a torch the first time a socket dies.
The gas isolation valve, next to the meter, and the meter itself. Read the gas, electricity and water meters the moment you arrive and photograph the readings with the dials legible and the date on the phone. That photograph is the whole of your defence if an opening bill arrives estimated and wrong, and estimated opening bills are common enough that we mention it on every job.
The boiler. Find it, find its manual if the seller left one, and find the pressure gauge. Most first-night heating failures are a pressure drop rather than a broken boiler, and repressurising is a two-minute job with a filling loop if you know where the loop is. Also locate the thermostat and work out whether it is battery-powered, because a dead thermostat battery presents exactly like a dead boiler.
Two pieces of local admin decide whether week one is calm or irritating, and both of them have to be sorted in the first forty-eight hours because both of them have deadlines you cannot see.
Bin day. Find out which day, which bin, and which week of the fortnight. Almost every East Sussex district runs alternating collections, so “Thursday” is only half an answer. Look on the council’s website by postcode rather than asking a neighbour who may be on a different round. Then find the bins themselves — sellers leave them in odd places, and a house that has been empty for a month sometimes has no bins at all, in which case you order replacements from the council and wait. This matters more than it sounds on the first night, because a house move produces an enormous volume of cardboard and the collection you miss is the one that leaves it stacked in your hall for a fortnight. We take our own cartons back on a full unpacking service, which sidesteps the problem entirely.
The parking permit. If the new house is in a controlled parking zone, you are one of the few people who genuinely needs a permit on day one and cannot have one, because the application usually wants proof of residence you have not received yet. Councils issue temporary or visitor scratchcards for exactly this gap; ask for them before completion rather than after. Our guide to parking permits when moving in Eastbourne covers the local process, and the same shape applies across most Sussex zones.
While you are at it: register for council tax, tell the council the date you moved in and the meter readings you photographed, and check the recycling centre’s booking system. Most Sussex household waste sites now want a slot booked online, and a van-load of flattened cardboard turning up unbooked gets turned away at the gate.
Nobody cooks properly on the first night and nobody should try. The oven is a make you have never used, the hob may be gas when you are used to induction, and half of what you need is in a carton marked KITCHEN 4 of 11. Decide the answer before move day rather than at seven in the evening when everybody is flat.
Three approaches that work. Order in, chosen in advance. Pick the takeaway before you move, check it actually delivers to the new postcode — rural East Sussex is full of addresses that look deliverable and are not — and have the number saved. Card payment, because you will not have found the cash. Bring it cooked. A cool bag with something made the day before that only needs a plate is calmer than anything else, and it means you eat at the time you want to rather than at the time a driver arrives. Shop on the way. Stop at a supermarket near the new house, not near the old one, and buy for breakfast as well as for supper. Breakfast is the meal everybody forgets and it is the one that decides what day two feels like.
Whichever you choose, plan tea within ten minutes of arriving rather than after the van has gone. Kettle, mugs, teabags, milk from a cool bag: a crew works better with a brew and so do you, and it is the first moment the place starts feeling like yours. Then put the milk, the butter and tomorrow’s breakfast in the fridge and let it get cold while you do everything else — a fridge that has been switched off and moved wants a couple of hours upright before it is properly cold anyway.
Have paper plates or one plate each and nothing more. Washing up on night one, with no tea towel and a sink you have not cleaned, is a job that expands to fill the evening. The full list of what should be in the box to make that possible is on the survival kit list, and the things people most often leave behind are catalogued in our most commonly forgotten items guide.
There is a short list of things that are trivial at nine in the evening and genuinely unpleasant at three in the morning. Do them before you sit down, because once you sit down you are not getting up.
Change the locks, or at least decide not to. You have no idea how many keys to this house exist. Cleaners, dog walkers, the seller’s adult children, the neighbour who waters the plants. Changing a euro cylinder is a fifteen-minute job with a screwdriver and a replacement barrel, and it is the cheapest peace of mind available on day one. If you are not doing it tonight, book it for the week.
Test the smoke alarms. Press the button on each one. A house that has been empty has almost certainly got at least one alarm with a flat battery, and a flat battery announces itself with a chirp at about two in the morning, from a ceiling, in a room you cannot identify. Do it now, with a chair, in the light.
Lock up properly and check the back. Front door, back door, patio doors, ground-floor windows, the side gate, and any window the previous owner left on a latch. Work out which key does what while you are awake. In a house you do not know, also check that the door you have locked is the one you can get out of in a fire — back doors with removed handles and mortice-locked patio doors are common and worth knowing about before you need them.
Set out tomorrow. Kettle, mugs, teabags, milk, cereal and bowls on a clear worktop; phone chargers plugged in somewhere you will find them; a torch by the bed. Then write tomorrow’s list on paper. Everything else can wait. The moving day step-by-step guide covers the hours before this one, if you want the whole day end to end.
The mistake nearly everyone makes on day two is unpacking by carton rather than by room. You open whatever is nearest, discover it is the contents of a bookshelf you have not built yet, and end up with the contents of eleven cartons spread across a floor and nothing finished. Unpack by room, finish the room, break the cartons down, and move on.
The order that works, and it is the same order in reverse of the one you packed in. Bathroom first, because it takes twenty minutes and it makes the house liveable: towels, toiletries, toilet roll, a bin, the shower curtain. Kitchen second, and give it most of the day. Wipe the cupboards out before anything goes in them, decide where things live before you unwrap them rather than after, and start with the things you use daily — kettle, toaster, plates, mugs, pans, cutlery, the chopping board. The wedding china and the pasta machine can stay boxed for a fortnight. Our kitchen packing guide explains why it comes out in that order.
Bedrooms third, starting with the children’s, because a child with their own room sorted will let you get on with the rest of the house. Clothes into wardrobes and drawers is fast work and it clears a lot of floor. Living room fourth: sofa placed, television on, one lamp, and then stop. Everything else can wait, and should. Studies, lofts, garages, the box marked MISC, and the things you were never going to use again are the reason people are still living among cartons in October.
Two practical notes. Break every empty carton down flat as you finish it, immediately, or the empties will occupy more floor than the full ones did. And set a rule that nothing goes into a cupboard you have not decided about — a move is the one moment when the whole contents of a house passes through your hands, and putting something away unthinkingly is how it survives another decade unused. If the thought of the whole exercise is too much, our unpacking service does it in a day and takes the cardboard away. Where to start when you are packing the next one is covered in what to pack first.
Most moving-in admin can drift. A short list cannot, and it is worth doing while you still have the momentum of the first two days rather than in a panic in three weeks.
Utilities. Contact the incumbent gas, electricity and water suppliers with the meter readings you photographed and the date you moved in. You are automatically on a deemed contract with whoever supplied the previous occupant, which is usually a poor rate, so switching is worth doing early rather than late. Broadband is the one with the longest lead time — if you did not order it before completion, order it now, because an engineer appointment can be a fortnight out.
Council tax and the electoral roll. Register with the new council, deregister from the old one, and get on the electoral roll at the new address. The last of those quietly affects your credit file, which matters if there is a mortgage product to arrange in the near future.
Insurance. Buildings cover should have started at exchange. Contents cover needs the new address and, if the house is bigger, an honest look at whether the sum insured still makes sense. Tell the insurer about anything that changed — a garage, an outbuilding, a home office.
Address changes. Bank, employer, DVLA for the licence and the V5C, GP and dentist, schools, pension, the vet, and a Royal Mail redirect running for a year in the background to catch everything you forget. Keeping a written list as post arrives at the old address is more reliable than trying to remember. Our moving house checklist sets the whole sequence out, and the cleaning checklist covers the property you have just left.
Free in-home or video survey, written fixed-price quote, BAR-protected deposit. Sussex’s family-run independent remover.
How a first night goes is decided during the load, not during the unload. We are a family-run Sussex remover with our own directly employed crews rather than agency labour, trained at our own staff training centre, working out of two depots — Lower Dicker on the A22 and our Croydon unit at Coulsdon. On a full removal that means pad-wrap on every freestanding piece, removal-grade cartons, beds dismantled and rebuilt as standard, and a load order that puts the beds and the boxes you need first at the tail of the van rather than buried at the bulkhead.
It also means the small things that only matter at seven in the evening: cartons labelled by room and put in that room, a walkway kept clear, the vacuum left out, and someone who will ask where you want the wardrobe before they put it there. A typical three-bedroom move runs eight to ten hours from crew arrival to the last carton placed, so the difference between a good load plan and a bad one is the difference between finishing at five and finishing at eight.
We are a full member of the British Association of Removers, audited annually, and every deposit — twenty-five per cent of the quoted price on booking, balance on completion — is protected under the BAR Advance Payment Guarantee. Across 120+ independent reviews we hold 4.9 out of 5. A written fixed-price quote follows the survey within 48 hours, whether the job is a flat across Eastbourne or a household going overseas.
Walk the house and label the doors with room names before the van is unloaded, then read and photograph the gas, electricity and water meters. Both take ten minutes and both save far longer later.
Yes. Bed frames are the one thing you cannot easily move or adjust once four trained people have gone home, and a made bed is what turns a building full of boxes into somewhere you can sleep. Our crews build beds as standard and will put the bedding on if you ask.
Most often under the kitchen sink, sometimes in a downstairs cloakroom, under the stairs or beneath a hall floor hatch. Turn it both ways while you are there, because one that has not moved in years can seize.
Bathroom, then kitchen, then bedrooms starting with the children’s, then one corner of the living room. Finish each room and flatten the empty cartons before opening the next, rather than working carton by carton.
If the street is in a controlled zone, yes, and you usually cannot get a resident permit yet because you have no proof of address. Ask the council for temporary or visitor scratchcards before completion day.