The guide
Unpacking Services in London: What Actually Happens on Move-In Day in full
What an unpack includes
The point of an unpack is not emptying cartons, it is putting a home back into use the same evening. Crews work to your instruction on where things live, and default to sensible placement where you have no preference.
- Beds assembled and made up for the first night
- Kitchen unpacked into cupboards you choose, appliances sited
- Wardrobe boxes hung straight onto rails, then collected
- Bathrooms and everyday items out and usable
- All packing paper, boxes and covers removed the same day
The order a crew works in
Beds first, always. If nothing else goes right, the household can sleep. Kitchen second, because it is the room that decides whether you can eat at home on night one, then bathrooms, then living space, then everything that can wait until a weekend.
Boxes are opened in the room they were labelled for, which is why the labelling discipline at the packing end matters as much as the wrapping.
What it costs, and how to buy less of it
Unpack-only in London starts at £150 for two packers over three to five hours. Combined with a full pack it adds about 45% to the packing figure, and it is the same crew both ends, which is why they know where everything is.
You do not have to buy the whole thing. A kitchen-and-bedrooms unpack gets a household functioning on night one and typically costs less than half of a full unpack.
Box collection and the waste nobody plans for
A three-bed move produces roughly seventy flattened cartons and a bin bag of paper, which is more than a London kerbside collection will take and more than most flats have room to store.
Empty cartons are removed on the day as part of an unpack. If you packed yourself or skipped the unpack, a post-move collection is £45 anywhere in London and wardrobe cartons are collected either way as they are on loan.
When an unpack is worth it
It earns its price where time is the constraint rather than money: a completion day with work the next morning, a family with young children, a downsizer who cannot lift, or a rental where the new tenancy and the checkout at the old flat overlap by hours.
