Man and Van Service Earlsfield

Bicycles cause more damage to other people's belongings than any other item in a small move. A chain wipes grease onto a cream sofa arm, a pedal gouges a veneered door, a bare axle scores the top of a chest, and none of it is noticed until the load is out. Earlsfield produces more than its share of them: terraced streets close to the station, households with two or three bikes, a pushchair in the hallway and a cupboard of sports equipment under the stairs, all of it awkwardly shaped and none of it designed to be stacked.

Preparing a bicycle for a load

Pedals come off or are wrapped, because a pedal is the part that reaches out and hits things. The chain and rear derailleur are covered with a bag taped in place. Where space is tight the front wheel comes out and is strapped alongside the frame with card between the two, and the forks are packed so they cannot close. Bikes travel upright against a side wall, secured through the frame rather than the wheel, since a wheel strapped under tension buckles. Handlebars are turned in line with the frame where the stem allows, which reclaims a surprising amount of floor space in the load bay.

Pushchairs, scooters and the folding trap

Anything that folds is folded and locked before it leaves the hallway. A pushchair that unfolds in the load bay becomes a lever and will mark whatever it meets. Wheels come off where they are designed to, and the wheels themselves are bagged because they carry road grime into a clean load. Car seats stay in the car. Small scooters and skateboards are boxed rather than loose, as they slide and end up under something heavy. Electric bikes and scooters are declared at the enquiry stage, since a damaged lithium battery is a fire risk rather than a repair job, and one that has swollen or been dropped should not be carried at all.

Sports equipment that needs its own thinking

Golf bags travel upright with the clubs strapped together inside. Skis and poles are banded and slid along a side wall where nothing rests on them. A rowing machine or a turbo trainer comes apart at the frame and is kept low in the load. Weights, if there are any, go against the bulkhead and are strapped before anything else joins them. A crew asked about payload at the enquiry stage can size the vehicle properly rather than discover the problem at the kerb.

Terraced hallways with no room to stage

These houses tend to have a hallway one metre wide with the stair rising from it, which means there is nowhere to stand a bike while the next item comes down. The answer is a strict relay: the vehicle becomes the staging area and items go out in the order they will be loaded, not the order they are reached. Crews covering these streets also run our man and van service in Wandsworth, and the terraced layouts change very little between the two.

When one load bay is not enough

One vehicle and two people handle a flat's contents, a part-load, a few pieces or a collection, which is what our man and van team describes. A full house of furniture plus four bikes, garden equipment and a loft's worth of boxes has passed that point and belongs with the team covering Earlsfield, where the capacity is planned against an inventory rather than hoped for.

What a booking covers

The charge is built from crew, vehicle and time, so bikes already prepared, panniers emptied and tyres deflated slightly where space is tight all shorten the job. Say how many bicycles there are when enquiring; two is a detail, five is a vehicle decision. Grease and grit from wheeled items end up on a hallway floor whatever care is taken, and cleaning services team in Earlsfield clears that at the old address, while tenants under a check-out inspection need the deeper standard of flexible end of tenancy cleaning in Wimbledon.