My fiancé-to-be: relishing the disposal of my bachelor-pad furniture ... once we'd hauled it up over a 30ft wall!

Weightlifting & Endurance

Moving house this past bank holiday weekend, was a big dose of weight-lifting and an endurance workout for me. I was moving out of a basement flat. As we couldn’t get any furniture up the narrow fire-escape staircase, we had to haul it up, vertically, from a dead-lift over a wall, with ropes and pulleys. The next challenge was arriving at my new home … a flat on the 4th floor, with no lift.

To avoid being crippled by next-day aches and pains, here’s how I organised my efforts.

Weighing Packing Boxes

Whilst packing boxes, knee deep in bubble-wrap, I weighed each box with my bathroom scales. By packing together light and heavy objects, I made sure most boxes weighed between 6 kg and 20kg. For safety’s sake, heavier items like books went into the smaller, easier to handle, boxes. The weight was then written on the top of the box.

Packing the Moving Van

On the day of the move, I alternated between picking up a lightly weighted box, then a medium weighted box and then a heavy box. This way I could rest between shifting the heaviest boxes. I had help from some local movers, to even out the day’s effort and help move the biggest, heaviest household items no-one should lift alone.

Full Body Workout

By Easter Monday, I had swapped London’s leafy Regent’s Park for the buzz of the West End, without killing my back in the process. However, I did have that all-over muscle ache that comes from a thorough full body workout.