The road to moving house is never smooth. First comes the snotty estate agent who tries to tell you what improvements you need to make to your house to give yourself the best chance of a fast sell. Why would you spend three months and several thousand pounds improving your house for someone else? You might just as well wait that time for the right buyer and keep the money in your pocket.

Then comes finding your next property. You make arrangements to view, turn up and find they’ve gone out. You make further arrangements, turn up, start to look round and find there’s a stinking teenager decomposing in his bedroom so you don’t feel you can look round properly. You’re steered clear of the bathroom after the man of the house as spent a good deal of time in there with the daily paper and leave with just a fleeting glimpse of where you are about to sink your life’s savings.

Once these things are under way, you then begin to make lists. Lists are the temporary bible of any house mover and absolutely essential. You will find lists on the fridge, lists in the handbag, lists on the office desk and lists stuck to the front of the TV to make sure you don’t forget.

You will have lists to help you find the right removal company, lists of who to notify, lists of who not to notify and lists of things to clean before you go. You will become a box fiend at weekends and in every shop you happen to pop into - grabbing boxes from the shop assistants out of their still warm hands. Always make sure these boxes are empty otherwise you will see yourself in court for shop lifting.

Employing a removal company is another major feat to be accomplished during house moving. Once you have done your research and decided which removal company you will be using, you then get them to give you a quote. This is when you begin to think they may be in cahoots with the estate agents and solicitors in a bid to extract all the profit from your house into their coffers.

Once you have removed an arm and a leg and paid all the people that are in business to ‘help’ you, you can sit back and relax for a few weeks until the big day comes. On that day, the removal company will arrive two hours late to see you pulling your hair out and all your belongings on the front path while the new owners removal company tramples all over it in a bid to get the job over and done with and shoot off to the pub.

Finally, you and your removal company will make it to your new home. Unloaded by midnight, you will collapse into an unmade bed in the desperate need of sleep. It’s when you wake up in the morning and dive right into a wall that you remember you have moved.

You will then spend the morning looking for the kettle which seems to have escaped you. This is when you discover how many different receptacles you can use to boil water and make tea in, although tea from a vase has a distinctly unpleasant aroma to it.

House moving expert Catherine Harvey looks at the implications a removal company can have on moving house.

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