Moving House from a Cheras Condo to Subang Jaya: One Family’s Story
This is a composite story drawn from moves our customers have described to us over the counter in Balakong and on WhatsApp. The family is invented, the details are not.
Short version: a family of three moved from a two-bedroom condo in Cheras to a double-storey terrace in Subang Jaya in September. They booked a Saturday service-lift slot, hired a mover on a per-trip price that turned out to mean something else, packed 52 once-used carton boxes over three weekends, got their RM300 deposit back from the management office, and slept in the new house on the first night with the beds made and nothing else unpacked. Here is how it went, including the parts that went wrong.
The decision, and the first mistake
Mei and Hafiz had lived on the 14th floor in Cheras for six years. The reason for the move was the one everyone in the Klang Valley knows: a second child on the way, a condo that had been “cosy” for one child, and a terrace house in Subang Jaya that Hafiz’s parents could reach in fifteen minutes. They signed the tenancy in mid-August with the keys due on the first of September.
The first mistake was made the same evening. Hafiz messaged three movers from a Facebook group, took the cheapest reply, which was a flat number “per trip, 3-tonne lorry, 2 men”, and considered the move arranged. Nobody asked how many trips the condo would need, whether two men could clear a 14th-floor unit inside a lift slot, or what “per trip” meant if the lorry came back half empty.
The management office sets the date, not you
Mei went down to the management office on the Monday to “inform them” of the move. She came back up with a form, a quote for the deposit, and a different moving date.
The building allowed moves only on weekdays and Saturdays between nine and five, in a booked service-lift slot of three hours, with a refundable deposit of RM300 against damage to the lift padding and the lobby. The Saturday they wanted was taken. The next free Saturday morning was the 6th of September, five days after the new house’s keys. They took it, which meant five days of paying for two homes and a weekend move after all.
If you take one thing from this story, take this: call the management office before you call the mover. Our guide to moving out of a condo and the lift slot has the eight questions to ask. Mei asked about four of them.
How many boxes, and where to get them
The guide figure for a two-bedroom unit is 30 to 45 boxes. Mei counted the bookshelves, the home office and a wardrobe of baby things kept “for the next one”, and ordered 40 medium, 8 small and 6 large, 54 in total, from shop.quinocycle.com. The lorry from Balakong came the next working day, flat-packed, and the guard let it into the loading bay because she had told the office.
Two things she got right without knowing it. She ordered mostly medium, which turned out to be the only size that rides a condo trolley in a neat stack of four. And she ordered once-used boxes, which cost a fraction of new ones and were, in her words, “exactly as strong as the boxes my Lazada orders come in, because they are the boxes my Lazada orders come in”. Our post on how many boxes a Malaysian home needs has the full table by home type; the condo-specific version is in choosing moving boxes for a condo.
They used 52. The two spare large boxes became the children’s cardboard house in Subang Jaya and are, as far as we know, still there.
Three weekends of packing
The packing followed the order in our when to start packing guide, mostly by accident, because it is the order that makes sense once you start.
Weekend one was everything they would not touch for a month: books, framed pictures, the display cabinet, the out-of-season clothes, Hafiz’s board games. Books went into small boxes only, after the first medium box of books could not be lifted off the floor. Our book-packing guide explains the arithmetic; the short version is that a medium box of paperbacks weighs more than a suitcase.
Weekend two was the kitchen, except the one pan, four plates and the rice cooker they would live on for the last week. Plates were packed on their edge, not flat, with a sheet of PE foam between each, and the glasses got bubble wrap and a box marked FRAGILE on four sides in fragile tape. Nothing broke. Mei credits the foam; we credit the fact that she packed the box full so nothing could move. Both are true. The method is in how to pack plates and glasses.
Weekend three was the hard one: the wardrobes, the toys, the home office, the bathroom, with a toddler who had decided that the boxes were the most interesting thing in the house. Clothes stayed on their hangers and went into large boxes in bundles of ten, tied with the hanger hooks. Documents went into document boxes with a lid, labelled OFFICE and travelling in the car, not the lorry. Every box was labelled on two sides with the room it was going to in the new house, not the room it came from, which is the single labelling trick that made unpacking bearable.
By the Friday night before the move there were 52 sealed boxes along the corridor wall, the beds were stripped, and the one pan was washed and in the last box.
Moving day: the lift slot, the movers, and the lorry that came late
The slot was nine to twelve. The mover had said “eight thirty”. The lorry arrived at twenty past nine, which in Klang Valley traffic on a Saturday morning is almost on time, and in a three-hour lift slot is a disaster.
Here is what two men and a 3-tonne lorry actually did in the remaining two hours and forty minutes, with the family carrying the small boxes themselves:
| Trip | What went down | Time |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | 24 boxes on the trolley in stacks of four, the fridge, the washing machine | 9:20 to 10:10 |
| 2 | 28 boxes, the dining table, the chairs, the mattresses | 10:10 to 11:00 |
| 3 | Two wardrobes, the sofa, the TV, the baby cot, the odd shapes | 11:00 to 11:55 |
The lorry took one load, not three. Trip here means trips down in the lift. Everything fitted in a single 3-tonne lorry load because the furniture of a two-bedroom condo is less than most people think, and because 52 boxes of one size stack into a wall. Our lorry-size guide has the numbers.
The “per trip” price turned out to mean per lorry trip to the new address, which was fine, because there was only one. What was not included was wrapping the sofa and the wardrobes. The movers had brought nothing to wrap them with. Hafiz went down to the car for the spare roll of stretch film Mei had bought with the boxes, and that roll is the reason the sofa arrived without a mark. If you hire on price, read our furniture-wrapping guide and bring the wrap yourself.
The management staff inspected the lift padding at five to twelve, signed the form, and said the deposit would be returned within two weeks. It was, by bank transfer, in eleven days.
Subang Jaya: the other management office
A terrace house has no service lift, which the family thought meant no rules. It has a guardhouse. The guard at the SS15 end of the street would not let a 3-tonne lorry in without the owner’s name on a visitor list, and the owner was in Penang. Twenty minutes of phone calls later the lorry was reversing up a road with cars parked on both sides, and the movers were carrying boxes forty metres from where it stopped.
The lesson is the same as the condo one. The new place has a management office too, even if it is one guard with a clipboard. Tell them.
The first night
The boxes labelled BEDROOM went upstairs first, and the beds were built before anything else was opened, which is the one rule in our unpacking order that nobody regrets. The kitchen box with the one pan went second. Everything else stayed sealed.
Mei’s message to us the next week, which is the reason this story exists, said that the happiest moment of the move was not the new house. It was sitting on the floor of the empty Cheras unit at noon, boxes gone, lift slot survived, deposit form signed, eating nasi lemak from the stall downstairs for the last time.
What they would do differently
- Book the lift slot first, then the mover, then the boxes. The slot sets everything.
- Get the mover’s inclusions in writing: number of men, trolley, wrapping, and what “per trip” means.
- Buy the stretch film and fragile tape with the boxes, not on the morning.
- Order ten percent more boxes than the count. They had two spare out of 54. That is too close.
- Tell the new address’s guardhouse the lorry is coming, with a plate number.
- Label by destination room, on two sides, with a marker that does not smudge on brown kraft.
- Break down the boxes the same week and keep twenty for the next move, because there is always a next move. Our post on what to do with boxes after moving has the options.
Moving to or from Subang Jaya?
Once-used Grade A carton boxes start at RM1.10 at shop.quinocycle.com, delivered from our Balakong warehouse the next working day anywhere in KL and Selangor, free for orders of RM300 and above and RM30 per trip below that. Subang Jaya, USJ and the SS neighbourhoods are on the daily run. Bubble wrap, PE foam, packing tape, fragile tape and stretch film ship in the same order. Collection from Balakong is welcome Monday to Friday 8.30am to 5pm and Saturday 8.30am to 1pm, or message us on WhatsApp at +60 16-891 6381 with the number of rooms and we will suggest a box count.
Bahasa Malaysia readers: kotak pindah Subang Jaya.