Guides
The double garage: moving the room nobody counts
Castle Hill's signature storage problem is behind a panel-lift door. Here is how the room nobody counts gets moved without surprising anyone on the day.
Why the garage breaks bedroom-count quotes
A "4-bed house" is a useful phrase for real estate and a poor one for removals. Bedrooms are predictable: a bed, a wardrobe, some boxes. A double garage is not. We have walked into garages holding a second fridge, a freezer, two bikes per family member, a workbench, camping gear for eight, and shelving to the ceiling on three walls. As load, that is more than a bedroom; on a big day it can be a quarter of the truck.
The fix is not clever, it is just honest counting: the garage goes into the sizing conversation from the start. It is why the Two-Truck Test asks about your garage before it asks about anything else in the house.
Sort it before you size it (three piles, one weekend)
- Goes.
Anything you would buy again if it vanished. Pack the small stuff into uniform cartons early; garages are where odd-shaped loose items breed, and loose items are slow items.
- Council pile.
The Hills Shire runs booked kerbside clean-up collections for residents, and moving is the natural time to use one. Book it a few weeks ahead of the move so the pile leaves before the trucks arrive.
- Not ours to carry.
Every garage holds a few things a removal truck should not take: open paint tins, fuel in the mower, gas bottles. Drain the mower, give away the half-cans, and swap the BBQ bottle rather than carting it.
How the crew loads a garage
Garage contents are dense, dusty and oddly shaped, so they load differently from furniture:
- Shelving is emptied into cartons first, then travels flat-packed or whole depending on how it is built
- Tools and heavy tubs ride low in the stack, never on furniture
- Bikes hang or stand strapped at the tail, loaded last, off first
- The garage is usually loaded onto the second truck on a two-truck day, so the house furniture stays clean and the unload order stays sane
That last point is half the argument for the full-house crew on a big Hills move: with 4 movers + 2 trucks ($500/hr), the garage gets its own space in the plan instead of being wedged around the dining table at the end of a long afternoon.
The quiet win: unpacking into the new garage
Tell the crew what the new garage is for: parking, gym, workshop. Tubs and shelving get set down to that plan, and you avoid the classic outcome where the new double garage is full on day one and the cars live on the driveway for another five years. No judgement; we have seen the statistics from the inside.
Sources
- The Hills Shire Council, Waste & Recycling: booked kerbside clean-up collections for residents; check current booking rules before you rely on a date.
Ready for the walk-through?
Tell us about the house, the garage and the dates. We come back with the right crew, the real hourly rate and how the day runs. No phone tag, no obligation, and nothing is booked until you say so.