Sevenoaks · TN13 · the Weald
It is a better question than how many bedrooms, because in this district the answer varies far more. A timber-framed house at Underriver, a Georgian townhouse off the Vine and a 1970s house at Dunton Green hold much the same furniture and need completely different care getting it out.
Free survey across the town, the villages and the Weald. If your house is ordinary modern stock we will say so rather than sell you protection it does not need.
Six kinds of house
Sorted by what can be damaged rather than by how much there is, because in a district with this range of building stock that is the thing which genuinely changes the day.
Lime, oak, moulded plaster, original glass. Slow, protected, and worth it.
Wealden cottages and timber frames
Tile-hung and timber-framed houses with lime plaster, uneven oak boards and glass that cannot be replaced like for like. Nothing about the furniture is difficult here; everything about the surfaces is.
What it involves → BGeorgian and early Victorian townhouses
Fine joinery, moulded plaster and a staircase with shallow treads and a slender handrail that was never designed to be leaned on. The stair is the single most protected object in a house like this.
What it involves →Modern materials built to be lived with. Volume and access decide the day.
Drives, verges, paths and gateposts — damage that happens before the door.
Storage in the right conditions, and distance done properly.
Listed, and stored appropriately
Goods collected, inventoried at the property and held. Where a load includes veneered, inlaid or unsealed timber, how it is held matters as much as that it is held, and we will say so rather than treat everything alike.
What it involves → FAcross the UK, and Europe by road
Long-distance work from Sevenoaks. Distance raises the packing standard rather than simply adding mileage, and on a load of old furniture that difference is the whole argument.
What it involves →The damage register
Almost never the furniture. It is the fabric of the building, and each material fails in its own way — which is why a single blanket approach to protection is either wasteful on a modern house or inadequate on an old one.
It crumbles rather than dents, and it takes the paint with it
Protection
Corner guards on every external angle, and boards on any wall a load must pass close to.
Why it matters
Modern plasterboard bruises and can be filled. Lime on lath does not bruise; a knock removes a patch, and making good means matching a material and a texture rather than a colour.
Scratched by grit, dented by a dropped corner, marked by a wheel
Protection
Full-width runners laid before anything comes in, and no wheeled equipment on bare boards.
Why it matters
Old boards are softer than they look and frequently unsealed. The damage is almost always caused by grit carried in on a boot rather than by the furniture itself.
Irreplaceably, and usually in a door rather than a window
Protection
Doors taken off their hinges where a load has to pass, and glazed doors boarded where they cannot be.
Why it matters
Crown, cylinder and early plate glass cannot be matched by modern float. It is the one material in a Weald house where damage is genuinely permanent.
At the arris — the sharp edge of a cornice, an architrave or a dado
Protection
Measured before the day, and anything that will not clear the moulding goes a different way.
Why it matters
The commonest Georgian damage is a wardrobe corner catching an architrave on a turn. It is entirely predictable from two measurements and entirely avoidable.
Cracked by point loads, lifted by a wheel, stained by a leak
Protection
Boards laid across the run, and the vehicle kept off anything not built for it.
Why it matters
Old paving is bedded on sand rather than concrete. A loaded sack truck concentrates more weight on one point than anything that path has carried in a century.
At the handrail, the newel and the nosing, in that order
Protection
Padded and strapped from the bottom step to the landing before any furniture moves.
Why it matters
A Georgian handrail is a slender piece of timber doing a structural job. Nobody leans on it deliberately; on a heavy carry somebody leans on it anyway, which is why it is wrapped.
Making good is the asymmetry that justifies all of it. On plasterboard a repair is filler and paint; on lime, old paint and unsealed timber it is specialist work. That gap is why the first hour of an old-house move goes on protection.
What listing actually restricts
This district has a great deal of listed fabric and the question arrives on almost every old-house survey. Here is how we work around it — which is a description of practice, not legal advice.
“A listing stops you moving out”
It does not, and nothing about a removal requires consent in itself. Listing controls alteration of the building, not the carrying of furniture through it. Most of what follows is about the small number of things a removal sometimes involves that are alterations.
“Anything screwed to the wall is yours to take”
Not necessarily. Fixtures can form part of a listed building, and removing a fitted item — a panelled cupboard, an overmantel mirror built into the joinery, old ironmongery — can require consent. Where there is doubt we leave it and ask.
“Fixing protection to the wall is fine, it comes off”
Our protection is free-standing, taped to itself rather than to the fabric, or held with low-tack materials on sound modern surfaces only. We do not fix anything into lime plaster, old joinery or stone, and we will use a different method rather than ask.
“An external lift is a last resort we can decide on the day”
It is a normal tool and an entirely reasonable one, but siting a lift against a listed elevation, or on a path or verge within a curtilage, is a question worth asking in advance rather than resolving with a machine already on site.
“Making good afterwards is straightforward”
On modern materials, yes. On lime plaster, old paint and unsealed timber it is specialist work, slower and more expensive than the damage looks. That asymmetry is the whole argument for spending the first hour of the day on protection.
Anything you are genuinely unsure about belongs with the conservation officer at the district council rather than with a removals firm. They are used to the question and the answer is free.
Leaving the country
Four routes with their own pages, each carrying the road out, the regions we deliver into and a document list split between what you obtain and what we obtain. We are a road firm — anything needing sea or air freight is referred to a specialist rather than quoted here.
Normandy, the Loire, the Dordogne and the south-west.
Route, customs and questions →Geneva, Lausanne, Zurich, Zug and the lake towns.
Route, customs and questions →Tuscany, Umbria, Piedmont, the lakes and Rome.
Route, customs and questions →Ljubljana, Bled, the Julian Alps and the Karst.
Route, customs and questions →A household leaving an old house here is usually carrying old furniture, and a long continental run is the hardest test it will ever get. That, rather than the border, is what changes on these routes — how the European side works.
Asked most often
More on the questions page — old fabric, listed buildings, the approach and the drive, ordinary modern houses, and what the quote is built from.
Both addresses, and roughly when the one you are leaving was built. That second answer tells us which category you are in and what the day needs.