September is the one week of the year when every hall of residence in the North West fills up on the same afternoon. Families arrive from all over the country, the car parks fill by mid-morning and the wardens work to a timed slot system that nobody reads until they get there. Booking van hire in Warrington for moving into university accommodation is worth doing early, because the vehicle is only half the problem and the arrival slot is the other half.
Why Arrival Day Is Not A Normal House Move
A student move is small in volume and difficult in access, which is the opposite of most jobs we hire for. There is rarely more than a car boot and a half of belongings, so the temptation is to squeeze everything into two cars and be done with it. What defeats that plan is the shape of the load rather than the amount. A mattress topper, a drying rack, a desk chair, a bike and four crates of kitchen equipment do not fit around each other in a hatchback, and the second car usually ends up making a return trip. A van does it in one. The constraint that actually matters on the day is the arrival window. Most halls allocate a slot of an hour or two per room, monitored by staff, and once your slot passes you are parking wherever you can find space and carrying considerably further. Book the van around the slot rather than the other way round, and confirm the slot before you confirm the vehicle.
Choosing A Van That Parks Where You Need It
Bigger is emphatically not better here. Campus car parks and the service roads behind halls are laid out for cars, with tight turns, height barriers and bays that a long vehicle will overhang. A short wheelbase low roof van will go almost anywhere a large family car will go, including under most car park barriers, which matters enormously if the loading area sits inside a covered car park. If there is a bike, a mattress or a floor lamp in the load, the extra standing height of a short wheelbase medium roof van makes packing far easier without adding any length. Between those two you can cover almost every first-year move. Where a student is moving into a shared house rather than halls and two or three people are combining a load, the calculation changes and a longer vehicle starts to make sense.
Packing For Stairs Rather Than For The Van
Most halls put first years on upper floors and many older blocks have either no lift or one small one shared by an entire building. That means everything you own has to go up a staircase, usually while other families are coming down it. Pack into crates and holdalls that one person can carry up a flight without stopping, rather than into two enormous suitcases that need both hands and a rest halfway. Soft items such as bedding and coats can travel in bin bags, which squash into gaps in the load and are easy to throw over a shoulder on the stairs. Label the box that has the kettle, mugs and a roll of bin bags in it and load that one last, because it will be the first thing wanted once the room is full of half-unpacked boxes and nobody can face going out.
What The Room Actually Needs And What It Already Has
Nearly every student room already contains a bed, a mattress, a desk, a chair, a wardrobe and shelving, and a good number arrive with a fridge as well. Families routinely bring furniture that will not fit and has to go home again in the same van. Check the accommodation office’s room inventory before you load rather than after, and be sceptical about anything large. The items genuinely worth the space are a mattress protector, a decent desk lamp, a clothes airer, a full set of kitchen equipment and something to make the room feel less like a hospital ward. Everything else can be bought locally in the first fortnight, and Warrington’s retail parks are a short drive from most of the region’s campuses if something turns out to be missing.
Fitting The Drive Around Our Opening Hours
We are open Monday to Saturday from 8am to 4pm and closed on Sunday, which is worth checking against the arrival date, because a good many halls run their intake over a weekend. If the slot falls on a Sunday, collect the van on the Saturday and return it on the Monday rather than assuming there is a way to drop it back in between. Collecting at eight on the morning of a Saturday slot gives you time to load properly and still arrive early. Short and long term hire are both available, and booking at least two weeks ahead brings a ten per cent advance booking discount on selected vehicles, which is easy to plan for when the university sent the date out in August.
Sorting The Driver Before The Day
The driver named on the hire has to be the person who collects the vehicle, and they need a photocard licence plus a DVLA check code generated in advance rather than a credit card at the counter. That catches people out when a parent books the van and a sibling turns up to collect it. Every vehicle we run sits at or under three and a half tonnes gross vehicle weight and is driveable on a standard category B car licence, so there is nothing further to arrange for most drivers. If nobody in the family has driven a van before, our guide on how to hire a van is worth ten minutes beforehand, and the van hire FAQs cover the paperwork side.
Thinking Ahead To The Move Out
The return journey in June is the one nobody plans for, and it is always harder than the arrival, because a year’s worth of accumulated belongings does not fit in what brought them. Students moving out of a shared house face the same problem with the added complication that everyone leaves on the same day and the landlord wants the keys back. It is worth keeping the crates rather than flattening them, and worth agreeing in September who is driving in June. Our advice on moving into your first flat covers the step after that one, which for a great many students in Woolston van hire and Birchwood van hire territory is the following summer.
Tell us which campus you are heading to, what time your arrival slot is and roughly what is going in the back, and we will point you at the vehicle that will actually fit the car park. Call the depot on 01925 396 222 once the university confirms the date.
