A partial packing service for the rooms that actually go wrong. You handle the wardrobes and the books; our crew takes the kitchen, the loft and the garage — the three rooms that make move day run late more often than anything else.
A partial packing service splits your house by room rather than by item. You keep the rooms that pack quickly – wardrobes, bookshelves, linen cupboards – and our crew takes the rooms that swallow a weekend. In Sussex that is nearly always the same three: the kitchen, the loft and the garage.
We built this option because of what we kept finding on move mornings. Customers who had booked no packing at all were usually 80 per cent done and 100 per cent stuck, with the easy rooms finished and the kitchen cupboards still full. The last 20 per cent is not evenly distributed. It sits in three rooms, and those three rooms are the ones a trained packer clears fastest.
So the decision is not really about what breaks. That is a different question and it belongs to fragile-only packing, split by item rather than by room. Partial packing is about where your own hours go, and whether spending them in a loft in August is a sensible use of the fortnight before completion.
This is the table we wish someone had shown us before we started quoting partial packs. The carton counts are what we actually budget for a three-bedroom Sussex house. The self-pack hours are one adult working alone with no interruptions, which is optimistic. The crew hours are elapsed time for two trained packers working the room together.
| Room | Cartons (3-bed) | Your hours, alone | Two-packer crew | Worth handing over? |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Kitchen | 15–20 | 10–14 | 3–4 | Yes · almost always |
| Loft | 8–15 | 8–12 | 2–3 | Yes · if it is boarded |
| Garage, shed and outbuildings | 10–14 | 8–10 | 2–3 | Yes · after you have sorted |
| Living and dining rooms | 10–14 | 7–9 | 2–3 | Usually |
| Children’s bedrooms | 6–10 | 5–8 | 1.5–2 | Yes · if the children are home |
| Study or home office | 6–10 | 5–7 | 1.5–2 | Split · you sort papers, we box |
| Adult bedrooms, clothes and linen | 12–18 | 6–8 | 1.5–2 | No · keep this one |
| Books and open shelving | 8–14 | 3–4 | 1–1.5 | No · fastest room in the house |
| Bathrooms | 2–4 | 1–2 | 0.5 | No · do it the night before |
Read down the fourth column and the pattern is obvious. The rooms where a crew is three or four times faster than you are the rooms where every item is a different shape and needs a decision. The rooms where we are barely twice as fast are the rooms where you are lifting identical objects into identical boxes, and paying someone to do that is poor value.
Books are the clearest example. Shelves empty into small cartons at roughly a shelf every four minutes whoever is doing it, so the professional advantage is small. Hand us the kitchen instead and use the hours you save on the paperwork, the meter readings and the moving checklist for the fortnight before completion.
These three rooms share a quality that no other room in the house has. Everything in them is a different shape, and almost nothing in them has a natural box.
The kitchen. A three-bedroom kitchen holds somewhere between four and six hundred individual objects, most of them awkward. Pans do not stack with lids on. Small appliances have trailing leads, loose blades and glass jugs that belong in three different places. Then there is the cupboard everyone forgets, the one with the half-used bags of flour and the open bottles, which cannot travel at all and has to be dealt with rather than packed. A crew clears a kitchen in an afternoon because they have a system for every one of those categories. Most people are still deciding what to do with the sandwich toaster at ten at night. There is useful detail in our guide to packing kitchen items safely when you move house if you would rather tackle it yourself.
The loft. Lofts are slow for a physical reason. You cannot pack in a loft, you can only pass things down, so every item is handled twice before it meets a carton. If the loft is unboarded it is slower again and our crew works from boards we bring. Lofts also hold the highest proportion of things that should not be moved at all, which is why we ask you to go up and make the keep-or-go decisions before our date. We pack lofts. We do not sort them.
The garage. The garage is the room where the rules bite. Petrol, gas cylinders, paint, thinners, weedkiller, aerosols, lithium tool batteries and fireworks do not go on a removals lorry under any circumstances, ours or anyone else’s. On a partial pack the garage is where a crew earns its fee twice over, once for the speed and once for sorting the loose fixings, part-used tins and orphan tools into something that can be lifted safely. Expect us to leave a small pile of things you will need to take to the household waste site yourself.
The honest counter-argument is that all three rooms benefit from a ruthless clear-out more than they benefit from a packer. If you have six months before you move, read how to downsize before a move first, then book the packing for what survives.
Self-packing is free at the point of use and expensive in a currency people do not count. The table below converts the room hours above into the thing that actually matters: how many evenings you are signing up for, and whether they fit in the time you have left.
We have assumed two usable hours on a weekday evening, because the first half hour goes on tea, finding the tape gun and moving the pile you made yesterday. Weekend days are counted as six working hours.
| Property | If you pack everything | If we take kitchen, loft & garage | Evenings saved | What you are left with |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| One-bedroom flat | 18–24 hrs | 8–11 hrs | 5–6 | Two weekday evenings and a Saturday morning |
| Two-bedroom house | 30–38 hrs | 13–17 hrs | 9–10 | One full weekend, unhurried |
| Three-bedroom house | 48–62 hrs | 21–27 hrs | 13–18 | A weekend plus three evenings |
| Four-bedroom house | 68–88 hrs | 30–38 hrs | 19–25 | Two weekends, with the loft already gone |
| Five-bedroom or large family home | 95–125 hrs | 42–55 hrs | 26–35 | Realistically a fortnight of evenings |
Two things fall out of this. The first is that a full self-pack of a four-bedroom house is a part-time job, and most people discover that in week two rather than week one. The second is that the saving from a partial pack is not linear with house size, it is linear with how much kitchen and loft you own. A four-bedroom house with an unboarded loft and a double garage is the strongest case on the table.
If the numbers here push you towards handing over the lot, that is a legitimate answer and it is costed on our full packing service page. We would rather you chose it deliberately than defaulted to it at eleven o’clock the night before.
This is the single most consequential fact about any split pack, and the reason we put it in the quote rather than the small print. Cover follows the hands that filled the box.
Cartons packed by our crew are covered under our transit cover for their stated value, because we controlled the materials, the wrapping and the seal. Cartons you packed yourself are treated as owner-packed, and the practical effect is this: if a carton arrives crushed or punctured, external damage is visible and a claim is straightforward. If a carton arrives intact and something inside it is broken, there is no way to distinguish a packing fault from a transit fault, and owner-packed cover does not respond.
That is not a Mark Ratcliffe Moving rule, it is how removals cover works across the trade, and any firm that tells you otherwise is not reading you their own terms. Ours are set out in full in our terms, conditions and insurance details.
| Who packed it | Carton marking | Damage to the carton | Contents broken, carton intact |
|---|---|---|---|
| Our crew, on your partial-pack rooms | Numbered MRM label, room code, sealed by us | Covered at stated value | Covered at stated value |
| You, in the rooms you kept | Marked PBO on the inventory | Covered, subject to the terms | Not covered |
| You, in your own supermarket boxes | PBO, and flagged by the crew at load | Assessed case by case | Not covered |
| Original manufacturer packaging, repacked by us | Numbered MRM label over the original | Covered at stated value | Covered at stated value |
The design rule that follows is simple. Anything you would be genuinely upset to lose should sit in a room you have handed to us, even if that room would otherwise have been a cheap one to pack yourself. Customers routinely give us the kitchen and keep the dining room, then remember on survey day that the dining room holds the wedding china. We move it into our column and the problem disappears.
Two further points. Use proper double-walled cartons for your own rooms rather than free supermarket boxes, which collapse under stack pressure and are the commonest cause of damage we see in self-packed loads; you can buy the same cartons and paper we use or collect from the packing shop at our Lower Dicker depot. And if a category worries you more than a room does, say so at survey and we will pick those items out individually rather than making you buy a whole room.
Here is the failure mode of partial packing. The crew arrives to do three rooms, and your rooms are not finished. Now our packers are working around your open boxes, your loose piles and your half-empty wardrobes, the rooms we came for take longer than the survey allowed, and if the pack runs into move day the loading starts late.
So we give every partial-pack customer a hard line rather than a gentle suggestion. By the end of the day before we come, the rooms you retained must be sealed, labelled and stacked clear of the doorways. Not nearly done. Done.
When a pack does overrun, the cause is almost never the rooms we were booked for. It is the four or five “I will just finish this” jobs scattered through the rest of the house. If you know you are behind, ring the depot on 01323 848 008 two or three days before rather than on the morning. We can usually add a packer to the crew, and a planned extra pair of hands costs far less disruption than an unplanned overrun.
A partial pack is not priced as a discount off a full pack. It is priced from what is actually in the rooms you hand over, which is why we count at survey rather than quote from a room name. Four things move the figure.
What does not move it is a tier name. There is no bronze, silver or gold here, and no minimum number of rooms. If the only thing you want packed is the kitchen, that is a valid job and we will quote it.
The comparison worth making is between a partial pack and a full one, not between a partial pack and nothing. Once you have priced four rooms, the step to the remaining five is usually smaller than customers expect, because the crew is already on site with materials loaded. Ask us for both figures on the same quote and decide with them side by side. Our general removals pricing page explains how a written quote is built, and a free survey is what turns it into a fixed figure.
Everything above assumes your boxes travel for two hours and get opened at the other end. If they are going into a sealed room at our depot for weeks or months, the correct split changes, and it changes in one direction only: you should hand over more.
The reason is dwell time. A box packed for a van journey has to survive a morning. A box packed for storage has to survive being stacked, sitting still through a humidity cycle and being lifted again by someone who cannot see inside it. Owner-packed cartons are where that goes wrong, because the failures are the ones you cannot see on packing day: single-walled board that slowly sags under the box above it, parcel tape that releases after a few months, and newsprint left against china.
There is also a retrieval problem specific to storage. If you might need one carton back at short notice while the rest stays sealed, the labelling scheme has to be designed on packing day, not invented at the depot. Our crew numbers every carton on two faces and ties it to the written inventory, which is what makes a single-box retrieval possible at all. That whole discipline has its own page: packing and storage booked as one job.
In practice, customers going into store keep the wardrobes and the books and hand us everything else, including the rooms this page would otherwise tell them to keep. The goods then go into our Prestige steel storage rooms at Lower Dicker, on one inventory, without being repacked in between. If the storage is because a chain has slipped rather than because you planned it, start with storage while moving house, which covers the first few hours after a date moves. The wider case for keeping the whole job with one firm sits on our removals and storage in Sussex page, and you can size the store itself with our volume and storage calculator.
We turn people away from this option regularly, and it is worth setting out when.
When nobody is going to do the other half. If both adults are working full time with a completion date three weeks away and children at home, the retained rooms will not get done. We have seen enough half-packed houses on move mornings to say it plainly. Book our full packing service and spend the evenings on something else.
When the worry is breakage rather than time. If what keeps you awake is the glass-fronted cabinet rather than the fortnight of evenings, you do not want a room-based split at all. You want the item-based one, which is fragile-only packing. Those two services look similar on a price list and answer completely different questions.
When the house holds specialist items. A piano, a long-case clock, marble tops, taxidermy, a serious art collection or anything that needs a bespoke timber case is outside a general partial pack. Those are separate lines handled by our piano moving crew, our antiques moving service or, where the whole house is at that level, the white-glove service with its item-level condition report.
When you are moving overseas. Export wrapping is a different standard with different materials and a customs inventory behind it, and a partially self-packed load creates problems at the port that are painful to fix. Talk to us about export packing and crating instead.
When you are downsizing into a much smaller home. The constraint there is what fits, not who packs. Sorting first and packing second saves far more than any split, and we would usually suggest a clearance conversation before a packing one.
The survey is where a partial pack either works or goes wrong, because the split has to be written down in a form two different parties can act on weeks later. Ours takes thirty to forty-five minutes in the house, or the same by video call if you are moving to Sussex from elsewhere.
We walk every room with you and mark each one in one of three ways. Ours means the crew packs everything in it. Yours means you do, and cartons are delivered for it. Split means you make the decisions and we do the boxing, which is how studies and children’s rooms usually end up. That room list goes on the written quote, so there is no argument on the day about whether the utility room was in or out.
You then get a materials schedule for your own rooms, counted from what we saw rather than guessed, and a delivery date for them. Unused cartons come back to us for re-use. We have put more than eighteen thousand boxes back through the Lower Dicker depot since 2017 and around seventy per cent of them go out again, which is also why we would rather you over-ordered than ran short at nine on a Sunday night.
On our packing day the crew completes an inventory of everything they sealed, numbered and room-coded. Your cartons are added to the same inventory at load, marked PBO, so one document covers the whole house. You sign it, you get a copy, and if any of it goes into store that same document follows the goods rather than being rewritten.
At the far end you can have the boxes placed in the right rooms and left, which is standard, or have our unpacking service open our cartons, put the contents away and take the cardboard with them. Customers who packed half the house themselves often take the unpack, on the reasonable grounds that they have already done their share. If you want to see how a split pack has worked for other Sussex households, the reviews page is where customers describe it in their own words, and about Mark Ratcliffe Moving explains who is turning up at your door. We are a BAR Overseas Group member, covered by the Advance Payment Guarantee, working to BS 8564, the British Standard for overseas moving services, published by BSI as BS 8564:2011. We cover Eastbourne, Hailsham, Lewes, Brighton and the rest of the county from the same depot – there is more on the local side on our Eastbourne removals page.
It is a packing job split by room. You tell us which rooms you want our crew to pack and you keep the rest, and both halves end up on one inventory. Most customers hand over the kitchen, the loft and the garage, because those three rooms take a trained crew about a third of the time they take a household.
The ones where every object is a different shape. Kitchens, lofts and garages are three to four times faster in a crew’s hands, so the value is highest there. Books, linen and hanging clothes are roughly as quick for you as for us, so keeping those rooms is sensible.
For a three-bedroom Sussex house, forty-eight to sixty-two hours for one person working alone. Handing over the kitchen, loft and garage takes that down to about twenty-one to twenty-seven, which is a weekend and three evenings rather than a fortnight of them.
Not in the same way. Cartons our crew packs and seals are covered at stated value. Cartons you pack are recorded as owner-packed, and if the box arrives undamaged but something inside is broken, that is not covered. Visible external damage to an owner-packed carton is assessed on the normal terms.
No. If the only room you want packed is the kitchen, we will quote that on its own. There are no tiers and no bundles, because the price comes from the carton count and the crew hours in the rooms you choose, not from a package name.
The pack takes longer and the cost moves, because our crew ends up working around loose contents. Ring the depot two or three days beforehand if you know you are behind and we will usually add a packer, which is cheaper and calmer than discovering it on the morning.
We recycle our own cartons and any unused ones we supplied. Supermarket boxes and third-party cardboard we will flatten and leave with you for kerbside recycling, because they do not go back into our re-use stock.
It works, but the split should move in our favour. Cartons that sit sealed for months fail differently from cartons that travel for two hours, and the failures are nearly always in self-packed boxes. Customers going into store usually keep only the wardrobes and the books.
Yes, up to about a week before, which is when materials and crew numbers are fixed. Adding a room later is usually possible but may move the start time, and we will tell you honestly if it cannot be done without running into move day.
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Tell us which rooms you want off your list and we will count them properly at a free survey, then quote the partial pack and the full pack side by side so you can choose with both figures in front of you. Call the Lower Dicker depot on 01323 848 008 or email office@markratcliffemoving.co.uk.