Why we take the legs off before it goes on the truck

A sofa with its legs on takes a third more bed than the same sofa with them off, and you are charged for bed. Ten minutes with a socket set is the cheapest part of the job.

Watch a cheap clearance crew and you will see them carry a wardrobe out whole, walk it up the ramp whole, and stand it in the bed whole. It looks efficient. It is the single most expensive thing they can do to your bill.

Junk is not liquid

Sand poured into a bucket finds its own level; a wardrobe does not. Rigid objects leave gaps between them, and those gaps are called the void fraction. You are not billed for the volume of your things — nobody could measure that — you are billed for the volume of the envelope they end up inside, gaps included. So every gap on that truck is air you paid to have hauled.

A wardrobe standing up in a bed is mostly air. Taken to panels, it is a flat stack four inches thick that slides behind everything else and takes almost nothing.

What actually comes apart, and what does not

Sofas and armchairs — legs off, laid on their backs. Ten minutes, a socket set, and the legs go in a bag taped to the frame in case you want it rebuilt at the other end.
Wardrobes and flat-pack — back to panels. Anything that arrived flat leaves flat.
Filing cabinets — drawers out and stacked separately, shell on its side. The shell is a box; the drawers fill each other.
Office chairs — gas lifts out, bases nested. Five chairs become the footprint of one and a half.
Mattresses — folded and strapped, not rolled. A rolled mattress is a cylinder, and cylinders are the worst shape there is for packing.
Fridges and washing machines — these do not come apart, and nobody should try. They are laid on their backs and squared to the tailgate, and everything else is packed around them.

Where the order matters

Big rigid things first, at the headboard, because they set the shelves everything else sits on. Soft and bagged goods last, because they are the only things that will take the shape of a gap. On most jobs the bags of garden waste cost nothing at all — they go into voids the load already had, and the fraction does not move.

What it saves

On the six-item demonstration on our front page, the same things go from six eighths of a bed to three. Same sofa, same wardrobe, same cabinet, same chairs. The difference is £145 and about twenty minutes of two people’s time with a socket set on the drive.

That twenty minutes is what a crew is for. If you are getting quotes and one firm is cheaper per load but loads whole, work out the fraction rather than the rate.