A bigger home does not need a bigger truck — it needs a plan. Within Lisbon and the suburbs the distances are short, so we run several trips with the same crew across one or two days. Same people, same care, one fixed price agreed in advance.
A 3.5-tonne van holds about 13 m³. A house is often 35 m³ or more, so the obvious answer is a bigger truck. In Lisbon the obvious answer is frequently wrong, because household goods weigh roughly 100 kg per cubic metre — a 22 m³ truck legally runs out of payload long before it runs out of space.
The second reason is access. A 12-metre truck cannot reach a great many Lisbon addresses at all, and the ones it cannot reach include most of the streets where the nicer houses are. It parks at the end of the road and everything is carried, which costs more than the extra trip would have.
So we run staged trips with the same crew. Inside Lisbon and the suburbs the return leg is fifteen to thirty minutes, which is cheaper than the hour of hand-carrying a large truck forces on you. On a genuinely long-distance move the maths flips, and we will tell you when it does.
A three-bedroom house inside Lisbon is usually a full day and three trips: bedrooms first, living room and kitchen second, garage and garden last.
Anything with a garden adds an hour or two that nobody plans for. Garden furniture, pots with soil in them, a barbecue, tools, sometimes a shed's worth of things that have not moved in years.
Houses in Cascais, Oeiras and Sintra are the most common ones we do, and there the driving is a real component rather than a rounding error. It is quoted as a fixed distance amount agreed in advance, never as time on a meter.
A two-day move is sometimes the better answer: load and drive on day one, unload and assemble on day two. It costs slightly more and it produces a considerably better second day, particularly with children in the house.