Decanting a storage facility - Challenges and Lessons Learnt

Published by Go2Removals -

We love what we do, and we love talking about our success stories and the way we’ve helped our customers solve their problems. Today we’re looking at a large client who we’ve been helping to decant their storage facility.

This is no small feat - they operate a large 50,000SqFt storage site in London where their customers store items in individual units. We’re tasked with moving their customers’ possessions and this involves a great deal of care, responsibility and professionalism on our part as we want to ensure that the company's positive reputation is upheld.

As part of this project, we’re moving their possessions to other storage facilities across London, and as customers are rarely present, our team wears body cameras at all times to document the moving process. This shows exactly what we’re doing, including the condition of items before, during and after the move as well as where we put them and how we move them. It’s an incredibly important part of the process, and this footage is filed and stored on our system where it can be used for any potential queries from customers in the future. We take great care with every project, but recording this footage just gives us and our client added peace of mind, and acts as a tool to refer to in the case of a customer query. Body cameras have been so useful that we’ve made the decision to use them on our other challenging jobs outside of the project too.

Another aspect that has made this project particularly tricky is that the contents of each unit isn’t known to us until the door opens on the day. Luckily we’ve got a highly skilled and adaptable team who aren’t phased by what the job throws at them, and they give every item the same level of care and attention when they move it, whether it’s a grand piano, a motorbike, film props, fish tanks or a 15ft unicorn, all of which have been encountered during this project!

As this is such a large project, we’ve also found that certain elements can be very time consuming, particularly when we encounter any archiving units. The moving process for these takes longer than normal as we need to ensure all items are put back in the exact same order as they were found. These units often have large racking systems too, which require dismantling and reassembling, and this adds to the move time.

So, what’s next? We’ll continue to decant the facility and estimate the project to be complete by the end of February 2022. As this has been such a large ongoing project, we find our team is becoming more efficient by the week as they develop new ways of working and we hope to take these learnings into any future jobs. We’ll be back with another update on this project once it’s completed, so keep an eye open for that!