Moving Day Timeline, Hour by Hour

A house move is not one long effort. It is a sequence, and each stage depends on the one before it. When a moving day in Nairobi collapses, it is almost never because the crew was slow. It is because one stage started before the one before it was finished — the truck arrived before the packing was done, the crew arrived before the gate had been cleared, the keys arrived after the truck.

Here is the sequence a well-run day follows. The clock times assume a standard Nairobi house move with a morning start; scale them up or down for the size of the job.

The day at a glance

Before 7:00 — be ready before they knock

Everything that goes wrong later starts here. Be dressed, be fed, and be finished packing. A half-packed kitchen at 7am means the crew boxes your plates instead of loading the truck, and the whole day slides. If you are packing yourself, you should have finished the night before — our packing tips guide explains why.

The essentials box — bedding, towels, chargers, medication, tea, toilet roll, a torch, tools, and the keys and paperwork for the new place — goes into your car now, not onto the truck. Documents, passports, title deeds and anything valuable go with it.

7:00 – 8:00 — arrival, the gate, and the walk-through

The crew arrives. Before the truck can even reach your door, it usually has to get through a gate — which is why you confirmed the access permit and the plate numbers with estate management two days ago. Expect the guards to check the vehicle. In many estates they will check it again on the way out with a loaded bed, and some will want a gate pass signed by the caretaker before anything leaves the compound. All of that is normal. It is only expensive if nobody arranged it, because a crew standing at a barrier is a crew you are paying for.

Then the walk-through. Ten minutes, with the crew leader, through every room including the store and the balcony. You show them:

• What is going and what is staying — be explicit, because a good crew will otherwise load everything.
• Which boxes are fragile.
• Which items must not be dismantled, and which must be.
• Anything heavy, awkward or valuable enough that it needs a plan of its own.

The crew lays down floor protection, checks the stairs and the lift, and confirms where the truck will stand. If your service lift is booked, this is when that booking earns its keep. If it is not booked, this is when you find out that a family two floors up has it until noon.

8:00 – 9:00 — wrapping and dismantling

Nothing heavy should leave a room unprotected. Sofas, mattresses and screens get covered. Table tops come off frames — a glass top carried down a Nairobi staircase still attached to its table is the most predictable breakage there is. Beds come apart, and the bolts go into a labelled bag taped to the bed frame itself.

This hour looks like the slowest part of the day, and every minute of it buys back two later. A crew that skips wrapping to look fast is not fast. It is gambling with your sofa.

9:00 – 12:00 — loading

There is an order to a truck, and it is not first-come-first-loaded. Heavy furniture and appliances go in first, along the walls and against the cab, so the weight sits low and forward. Boxes are stacked in around them, heavy at the bottom, light on top. Fragile boxes go last, on top, where nothing can crush them. Mirrors, glass and screens travel upright, wedged against something solid.

Your job during this stretch is not to carry things. It is to stay reachable, answer questions quickly, and keep an eye on the rooms as they empty. Look on top of every wardrobe. Look behind every door. Look in the store, the balcony and the meter cupboard.

12:00 – 13:00 — the empty house, the meters and the deposit

This hour is worth money, and most people rush it.

1. Sweep the house. Every cupboard, every wardrobe top, under every bed, the store, the balcony, the bathroom cabinet. Then do it once more. Things get left in the same five places every single time.
2. Photograph the meters. KPLC and water, clearly, with the reading legible. Note the meter numbers. Settle and close the final bills so nothing follows you to the new address, and so the landlord has nothing to deduct.
3. Clean, at least to the standard your agreement asks for.
4. Do the landlord inspection with the landlord or agent present. Walk the unit together. Agree the condition in writing, or at minimum photograph every room after the clean and send the photos to them the same day, so the state you left it in is not a matter of memory.
5. Hand over the keys only after that conversation, and confirm in writing how and when the deposit comes back.

A rushed handover is how deposits disappear. The truck can wait ten minutes.

13:00 – 14:30 — transit

Go ahead of the truck if you can. Get to the new place first, clear the corridors, confirm the lift, meet the caretaker and make sure security is expecting a loaded vehicle. If the new estate needs the truck details logged at the gate, sort it before the truck is sitting there.

Plan the route around the hour. Thika Road in the morning peak and Mombasa Road on a Friday evening are not the same roads they are at eleven in the morning. A crew that knows the corridor will already have factored this in.

14:30 – 17:00 — unloading, and the one thing you must do

Stand where you can see the door and direct traffic. Every box has a room written on it; your job is to make sure it goes into that room. A box that lands in the wrong room gets carried twice, and the second time is by you, at midnight.

• Furniture goes in first, and goes where you want it. Decide now, not after the room is full of boxes.
• Beds get reassembled — the bolts are in the bag taped to the frame.
• The fridge is stood upright and left to settle before it is switched on. Powering up a fridge that has just travelled lying down is a good way to kill it.
• Fragile boxes come off last and get put down somewhere they will not be walked into.
• Open the OPEN FIRST boxes while the crew is still there, and check the things you would want to know about now, not tomorrow.

17:00 onwards — before the crew leaves

1. Walk the empty truck. Look in the corners and under the blankets. Small things hide there.
2. Check the inventory against what came off, and check the items you flagged as fragile.
3. Say something now if anything is wrong. Damage raised while the crew is still standing there is a conversation. Damage raised a week later is a dispute.
4. Settle up as agreed — the price you were quoted, which should be the price you pay.
5. Ask them to take the empty boxes, if you would rather not live with a cardboard mountain. We do that on request.

When the day runs late — and it sometimes does

Not every move goes to the clock. The lift breaks. The new landlord is late with the keys. The estate will not admit the truck until the guard has phoned someone who is not answering. Rain turns the last hundred metres into something the truck will not attempt.

What matters is that somebody tells you honestly what is happening and what it means. A crew that quietly speeds up to make the time back is a crew that is about to drop something. The right response is to slow down, protect the load, and finish properly — even if that means dark.

Most of these delays are booked in advance, though, not discovered on the day. Every one of them is in the moving checklist, two days out, as a phone call you should already have made. And if you want to understand why waiting time is the most avoidable line in any quote, read what drives your moving cost.

Ready to book a day that runs like the one above? Look at house and apartment moving, or just get a free quote and tell us the date.