Storage and Removals
When a chain breaks or a sale completes before the purchase, your belongings need somewhere to sit and a van at both ends. TowManVan handles the moving half: we load your home, drive to the storage unit you have booked, and stack it properly, then collect it all again when the new place is ready. From £35/hr, price fixed before you confirm.
The honest bit: we move it, you rent it
Plenty of removal firms advertise "removals with storage" and quietly resell you a unit at a mark-up. TowManVan does not. We are a moving platform, not a self-storage company, and the unit is something you rent directly from a facility you choose. That is worth saying plainly at the top of the page rather than burying it in a booking confirmation.
In practice it works in your favour. You compare facilities on your own terms: monthly rate, how long the introductory offer lasts and what it reverts to, access hours, whether the unit is ground floor, how far the trolley run is from the loading bay, and what their contents insurance actually covers. Then you book the van separately for the day you need it. If your dates slip, which on a broken chain they very often do, you are moving one booking rather than renegotiating a bundled contract.
The insurance split follows the same logic. Every TowManVan driver is DBS-checked and carries goods-in-transit insurance of at least £10,000 plus public liability cover, verified before they are allowed to accept a job, and that protects your belongings while they are being carried and driven. The moment the unit door closes, cover is between you and the facility. Ask them what the standard policy caps out at, because the default is often lower than the replacement value of a family's contents.
Six reasons a household ends up in a storage unit
Almost nobody plans a storage move from the start. It arrives as a problem to be solved on a deadline, usually with a completion date that will not move.
Choosing a unit size, and the van that fills it
Facilities quote in square feet, which tells you nothing useful until you translate it. This is the rough guide our drivers use, and it assumes you stack to the ceiling rather than covering the floor once.
| What you are storing | Unit size | Roughly like | Van to fill it |
|---|---|---|---|
| A few rooms of furniture | 25-35 sq ft | Large garden shed | Small van (£35/hr) |
| Studio or 1-bed flat | 50-75 sq ft | Small single garage | Medium van (£45/hr) |
| 2-bed house or flat | 75-100 sq ft | Single garage | Luton van (£60/hr) |
| 3-bed house | 125-150 sq ft | Garage plus a shed | Luton van, often 2 loads |
| 4-bed house | 175-200+ sq ft | Double garage | Luton van, 2-3 loads |
Two things skew this. If you need to get at your belongings while they are stored, add roughly a quarter to the size so you can keep a walkway down the middle, otherwise every visit becomes an unload-and-reload. And if you are storing only part of a home, measure the actual furniture rather than the property: a three-bed house that is keeping its beds and sofas but sending the rest into store is a very different job from the whole contents. If it turns out to be a handful of items rather than a household, look at small removals or a single item delivery instead of booking a Luton.
The two-leg cost reality
The single most common surprise on a storage move is that you are buying two removals. Here is everything that lands on the bill and who bills you for it.
| Cost | Paid to | Detail |
|---|---|---|
| Leg one: home to storage unit | TowManVan | £35/hr small van, £45/hr medium, £60/hr Luton. 2-hour minimum, second helper £12/hr. |
| Monthly unit rent | Your storage provider | Billed by them, not by us. Ask about the promotional first month and what the rate rises to afterwards. |
| Contents insurance while stored | Your storage provider | Arranged with the facility. Our goods-in-transit cover applies while your things are on the van, not while they sit in the unit. |
| Leg two: storage unit to new home | TowManVan | Charged again at the same hourly rates, with its own 2-hour minimum. There is no return discount. |
| Packing, dismantling, reassembly | TowManVan (optional) | Packing £25/hr per packer. Dismantle and reassemble £30 per item, useful for beds and wardrobes that will not fit a unit assembled. |
A worked example. A two-bed house going into a 100 sq ft unit across town takes a Luton van and two people about four hours door to door. That is £60/hr for the van and driver plus £12/hr for the second helper, so £288 for the move in. Three months later the same job runs in reverse for a similar figure. Call it around £576 of transport for the round trip, before the facility's rent. None of that is hidden: the price is locked in the app before the booking is confirmed, and the in-app clock that you and the driver can both see tracks the hours, rounded up to fifteen minutes.
Two levers move that total. The first is timing: weekend and evening bookings are charged at 1.3x, which turns a £60/hr Luton into £78/hr, and on a job you are paying for twice that difference compounds. If either leg can happen midweek, take it. The second is distance. The first 15 miles are included and a per-mile rate applies beyond that, and storage facilities have a habit of sitting on industrial estates on the edge of town, so the site that is £15 a month cheaper can quietly cost you more in mileage across two legs than it saves in rent. Compare the full picture on our man and van prices page before you commit to a facility.
Load it last and it comes out first
A storage unit is a queue with one end. Whatever goes in first sits at the back behind everything else, so the packing order has to be planned backwards from the day you need things again.
Weight goes low regardless of order. Books and tools at the bottom in small boxes, light bulky things on top, nothing stacked so high that it leans when the door opens. Sofas stand on end against a side wall with a cover over them, which frees an enormous amount of floor. Mattresses go upright in a bag rather than flat, because flat means something ends up stacked on them. Wardrobes, drawers and suitcases travel full of soft items: bedding, towels, coats. Empty space you have paid rent on for six months is the most expensive space in the unit.
Beds, large wardrobes and modular sofas often will not go through a storage doorway assembled, and forcing them wastes clock time. Dismantle and reassembly is £30 per item, which is usually cheaper than a bigger unit. Anything with real value or fragility, a piano in particular, needs its own conversation before the day: see piano removals for how those are handled.
What should never go into a storage unit
Most storage damage is not theft or flooding. It is something that went in wrong and had months to do its work in the dark.
Defrost the freezer at least twenty-four hours before moving day and leave the door propped open to dry, and drain the washing machine hoses the night before. Both are jobs that cannot be rushed on the morning while a driver waits on the clock. The things that fail the list above are often the things you were never going to want back: a house clearance before packing day usually shrinks the unit size you need.
Labelling and inventory, the part everyone regrets skipping
On a normal house move you unpack within a week and a vague "kitchen" scrawled on the side is enough. Storage is different, because six months later nobody remembers which of the eleven kitchen boxes has the coffee grinder in it, and finding out means opening all eleven in a cold unit with a torch.
Number the boxes instead of only naming rooms. Box 1, box 2, box 3, straight through, and keep a running list in your phone notes with a line of contents for each. It takes an extra ten seconds per box on packing day and turns a two-hour rummage into a thirty-second search. Write the number on the top and on at least one side, because the side is the only face you can read once boxes are stacked three high. Mark the handful you will want first with something obvious, a strip of coloured tape works better than writing "OPEN FIRST" that gets buried facing the wall.
Before you lock the unit for the last time, stand in the doorway and take three or four photos. You will use them to remember what is in there, to prove condition if you ever need to claim, and to tell the driver on the move out roughly what is coming so the right van is booked. If you are paying for a full removals crew or adding packers at £25/hr per packer, tell them the numbering scheme at the start of the day and they will keep it running.
How a storage move runs
Ask the facility for a ground-floor unit near the loading bay if one is available. A long trolley run through corridors and a goods lift can add an hour at each end, which on an hourly booking paid twice costs far more than the few pounds a month a better-placed unit usually carries. If the date lands at no notice, see same-day man and van, and for a heavy load with stairs at both ends, 2 men and a van is usually faster than one person taking twice as long.
When storage is the wrong answer
We would rather you book the right thing than the expensive thing. If the gap between moving out and moving in is only a day or two, storage is rarely worth it: two full removals plus a month's minimum rent to cover forty-eight hours is poor value, and it is usually cheaper to ask whether the seller will let boxes stay put, or to book a single move on the later date and live out of suitcases in between.
If you are storing because you cannot face deciding, be honest about the arithmetic. A £120 a month unit holding furniture you will not want in the new place costs more over a year than replacing most of it, plus two moves to shuffle it around. Clearing first and storing less is almost always the cheaper outcome, and it shrinks both legs of the transport at the same time.
And if the whole job is a few boxes and a bike rather than a household, a unit and a Luton are overkill: a man and van on the small van rate with a 2-hour minimum will move the lot for £70 and you may not need a unit at all. Storage earns its keep on real gaps, real chains and real overseas postings, not on indecision.
Storage and removals FAQs
Got your unit? Book the van
Fixed hourly price locked in before you confirm, DBS-checked driver, goods-in-transit cover on the road. From £35/hr with a 2-hour minimum, and about sixty seconds to book.
Price your storage moveMel Carrington - Head of Removals Operations
Mel ran national removal fleets at Pickfords for 15 years before joining TowManVan. She signs off every van-size recommendation, hourly rate and handling standard on this page. Questions? Email mel@towmanvan.co.uk. All figures reviewed August 2026.
Last updated August 2026. Prices verified August 2026 by Mel Carrington.