Every do-it-yourself move requires the use of a truck. This means trying to figure out what truck is the right size for your move. Choose too small, and it might mean multiple trips for a short move — or worse, for a long move. Choose too large and your belongings might be damaged by shifting around during your move. Here are some tips for picking the right sized moving truck for your moving day.
How Much Stuff do You Have?
First, start by taking stock of just how much stuff you are going to move. Count the number of rooms in your home. As you are counting them, look to see how full your rooms are. You need to take into account things like how much furniture is in each room as well as what might be hidden away in drawers or closets.
A good way to do this is to make a rough sketch of your home. Simply put down the room and whether the room has a low, moderate or high amount of items in the room. If there are any large pieces of furniture, note that on the map that you create so you can begin to estimate the size of truck you are going to need.
Truck Sizes Simplified
Some companies will want to rent you a small, medium or large truck. That doesn’t really tell you anything and isn’t very helpful to you. The real measurement that you want to know is cubic feet. How much space does each truck have?
Remember, when a company quotes you how many feet the truck can hold, they are counting the entire space inside the truck. This means floor to ceiling. Unless you are a Tetris champion and all of your belongings fit into those shapes, you are going to have some wasted space in the truck, mostly near the ceiling. You are going to need to take that into account when you are choosing your truck. Picking a truck that is slightly larger than you need will help to compensate for this wasted space.
Rooms per Cubic Feet
You can start by using the rule of thumb that one room in your home takes up about 300 cubic feet of space. So, a 1,000 cubic foot truck should be able to hold about three or three and half rooms’ worth of things.
That is a general estimate made on the assumption that your rooms are moderately filled. Now is the time to head back to the sketch that you made and do a little math. If a room is marked moderate, then you can probably give it a value of 300. Rooms you marked low you can rate as 200 and rooms that you marked as high you probably want to assign a value of 450. Take all of the numbers and add them up, this should give you a good estimate on truck size.
Why not avoid all the hassle of choosing a truck by having Bradford Moving do your move for you? Contact your Georgina Movers today for a free estimate.