There is a pattern to November. The first properly cold, wet week arrives, and the phone starts ringing with sites wanting an extra welfare unit, a drying room, or a canteen moved somewhere less exposed. All of them want it that week.
Nothing about the work is difficult. The difficulty is that a lorry can only be in one place at a time, and when forty sites all reach the same conclusion on the same Monday, somebody is waiting until the following week.
What sites end up wanting, and when
Welfare and drying space is the first thing. A site that coped with one cabin in September finds it does not cope in November, when everybody arrives wet and there is nowhere to put twenty coats.
Then comes moving what is already there. A cabin parked somewhere sensible in summer can turn out to be in the wrong place once the ground softens and the compound entrance has to change. Repositioning a unit within a site is a short job and it is one of the most common things we do in November.
Then stores and secure units, because the dark afternoons change how a site thinks about leaving anything out overnight.
And then, most of the time, something nobody planned for. A phase moves, a compound has to shift, or a unit turns out to be sitting exactly where the new access is going.
Why ordering early actually changes the outcome
Three reasons, and none of them is a sales line.
The first is daylight. A lift needs light, and from late October the usable part of the day is short. Fewer hours in the day means fewer jobs per lorry, so the same diary holds less work than it did in September.
The second is weather. A wet week does not just slow sites down, it moves lifts. Ground that will not take a loaded lorry pushes a job to the next dry day, and that day was already spoken for.
The third is the ground itself. Getting a cabin into position while the compound is still firm is a far easier job than getting one in across a churned up haul road in December. The same lift, a month earlier, is a different job.
Give us the sequence, not just the delivery
Where several units are going in, we would rather see the whole plan than one date. Which unit goes in first, where each one sits, whether anything is stacking, whether steps and a walkway are coming too, and what has to be moved out of the way to make room.
We can usually do more in a day than people expect if the order is right, and far less than they expect if it is not. Our cabin and modular building transport page covers the units we move and how stacked work is handled, and our site moves page covers getting a whole compound in or out.
If your site is going to be running past Christmas, work out now what it needs and email us at info@manchesterhiabshire.co.uk to get the dates held. The fortnight everybody wants is the one that runs out first.
Need a lorry? Ask for a quote or email us and tell us what needs moving.
