Moving as a student away from home: from one room to another without a car

The contract on your room ends at the end of the month, the new one starts on the first, and there is not a single day in between. Your things are in one room, but not only there: a shelf in the fridge, a shelf in the bathroom, two pans mixed in with your flatmates'. And the car, if your family has one, stayed at your parents' place.

A student living away from home makes two different moves. The long one, from the family home to the university city, usually happens once, with suitcases and with whoever goes with you. The short one, from one room to another in the same city, happens more often and is almost always done alone. This article is about the second one.

Before you pack, separate what is yours from what belongs to the flat

In a shared flat, things are not sorted by owner. The frying pan you have used for two years may have belonged to the person who lived there before you. The three of you bought the clothes airer together. The blender is yours, but it sits in someone else's cupboard.

If you start filling boxes before you have settled this, one of two things happens: you take something that is not yours, or you leave behind something that is. You find out about both too late, when the new room is already full and the old one already belongs to someone else.

Walk round the flat one evening with your flatmates there, and settle it out loud: what is yours, what is shared, what gets split. Only then do you start filling. It is also the moment to read the contract for your room again, because the deposit is decided at the handover, not on moving day.

Then count. "But I only have one room" is the phrase behind getting the number of boxes wrong: there is little furniture, but plenty of objects. Books and notes from a few years of study, clothes for two seasons, your share of the kitchen and the bathroom. A room you have lived in, once emptied, fills more boxes than you would guess by looking at it.

Without a car, the problem is the empty boxes

The trip everyone plans is the one on moving day: a friend with a car, a hired van, a removal company booked for half a day. The trip nobody plans is the one before, when the boxes have to be brought home empty.

Without a car, you carry the cardboard boxes home yourself. You hunt for them at the supermarket or buy them, you carry them folded under your arm, and once in your room they have to be assembled and taped along the bottom. You need a roll of tape and a flat surface to assemble them on, and in a room of a few square metres that surface is the bed.

If you choose home delivery, we bring the Cangubox to your door. They arrive ready to use: you lower the two halves of the lid, they hook onto each other, and no tape is needed. Delivery and collection are booked separately: the boxes can be delivered to the old room and collected from the new one, as long as both addresses are within the service areas.

On moving day, you organise the trip for the full boxes yourself, and it is worth saying when to call someone. If you have a bed or a desk of your own to take apart, a back that has hurt before, or a fourth floor with no lift to clear in one afternoon, a removal company or a van with a driver is the right choice. And there is the middle way: they carry, and you have packed calmly in the days before.

In a shared flat, the space is not yours

In the old room, the problem is where to keep the full boxes. The hallway belongs to everyone, and five cardboard boxes left wherever there is room become a problem for anyone who needs to get past. The Cangubox are rigid and have a flat lid, so they stack on top of each other: one pile in a corner of your room, with the heaviest at the bottom, rather than a row along the walls of the flat.

On the day you leave, you have the Dolly, the trolley you get with every rental: a platform with four swivel castors. You stack the boxes on it and push them to the lift and then to the front door, rather than carrying them one at a time down the hallway.

In the new room it works the other way round: within a couple of days you have unpacked everything, and the boxes are left in your room. Cardboard boxes have to be flattened, tied up and taken down on paper collection day. Empty Cangubox need none of that: you open the flaps, slot one inside the next, and until collection they sit in a corner.

You choose how long to rent for when you book, and you will find it in the price list along with the kits: doubling the rental period does not double the price. The time to book is when you sign the new contract, not the week before you move out.

If you have both dates in hand today, do three things: the walk round the flat with your flatmates, the box count, and deciding who carries what on the day you leave. Everything else comes after, and once those three are done it is quick to decide.