Moving During Hurricane Season in Central Florida

What the season actually looks like here

June and July are usually quiet on the tropics and loud on the afternoons. Inland Central Florida gets a near-daily convective storm from roughly two o'clock, which is why crews start at seven — not because of hurricanes, but because the heavy carrying wants to be done before the sky opens.

The tropical part of the season sharpens from mid-August to mid-October. That is when a named system in the Atlantic is worth paying attention to on a week you are moving.

And November, for a local move, is one of the easiest months of the year: the season is winding down, the heat has broken, and the end-of-month crush is the only thing you are competing with.

Watch and warning are not the same word

Worth knowing precisely, because the two carry very different instructions.

A hurricane watch means hurricane conditions are possible in your area. It is issued about 48 hours before tropical-storm-force winds are expected to arrive — deliberately early, because once the wind is at tropical-storm strength, preparing outdoors stops being safe.

A hurricane warning means those conditions are expected, and it comes about 36 hours ahead.

For a move, the practical translation is simple. A watch is when you call your mover and agree a plan. A warning is when the move is not happening on that day and everyone's attention goes elsewhere. Do not be the household loading a truck under a warning.

Book earlier than you think, and not for the reason you think

The end of the month is the busiest window in this business in any season, because that is when leases turn over. Add a storm that shuts down a couple of days in the middle of August and every one of those bookings has to land somewhere else — which means the following week is full too.

So the booking advice is not "avoid the season". It is: get your date in the diary well ahead of it, and if your dates have any flexibility at all, say so when you book. A mover who knows you could go Tuesday instead of Friday can do a great deal more for you when a system forms.

If you are booking inside the peak weeks, ask two questions up front:

• What happens if we have to postpone for weather, and is there a charge?
• How much notice do you need to move the date?

Both are reasonable questions and any established company will have an answer ready. There is a longer list of the questions worth asking in how to choose a moving company.

Three days of slack is the whole trick

If your lease or closing gives you a hard date with nothing either side of it, a two-day delay becomes a crisis. If you have given yourself three days, it becomes an inconvenience.

Ways to buy that slack, roughly in order of how easy they are:

• Move mid-week and mid-month rather than on the last Friday.
• Ask for the earliest slot of the day rather than an afternoon one.
• If you are between a lease and a closing, negotiate the overlap rather than the tight handover. A few days of paying for both is cheaper than an emergency.
• Get the packing finished a week early rather than the night before, so a postponement costs you nothing but a date. Room by room packing has a sequence that makes that realistic.

Keep these out of the truck

You would keep most of them out anyway — but the reasoning changes in September. If a system arrives between load and unload, or the power is out at the new place for two days, these are the things you will want in your car rather than in a sealed truck across town.

• Medication, and a written list of what everyone takes.
• Phone chargers, a power bank, and the laptop.
• Documents: IDs, passports, insurance policies, lease or closing paperwork, vehicle titles.
• Cash. Card terminals do not work in a power cut.
• A torch each, and spare batteries. Not the phone.
• Water and a day of food that needs no cooking.
• A basic first aid kit.
• Pet medication, food and the vaccination record.

If you already keep a hurricane kit, the honest answer is that it should travel with you rather than get packed. It is the one box where being a bit over-prepared costs nothing.

Photograph everything before it is wrapped

Ten minutes with a phone, room by room, before the packing starts. Furniture, electronics, anything valuable, and a close shot of any damage that already exists.

This is good practice in any month. In storm season it is better than good practice, because if something does go wrong — in transit, in a delay, in a garage that took water — the difference between a straightforward claim and a long argument is almost always whether you can show what the item looked like beforehand.

It is also the point where it is worth actually reading what your coverage is. Basic liability included with a move is often calculated by weight, which pays out very little for anything light and expensive, and household policies vary widely on goods in transit. Moving insurance, explained plainly covers the distinction.

If you are moving into Florida during the season

Two things to sort out in the first week, before they are urgent.

Find out your evacuation zone. Every coastal county here publishes them, and they are about storm surge rather than wind, so they follow the water, not the postcode. Brevard and Volusia addresses in particular can sit in a zone that an inland Orlando address never would. Look it up on your county's emergency management site.

Find out what the house has. Shutters or impact windows, and where the shutters are stored. Whether there is a generator and whether it works. Where the water shut-off is. Which way the garage door releases by hand.

None of it takes long. All of it is much harder to establish on a Thursday afternoon with a cone over the state.

The week of the move

If nothing is named, this is an ordinary move and you can ignore all of the above.

If something is named and it might matter:

• Check the forecast in the morning and once in the evening, from the National Hurricane Center rather than from a headline.
• Talk to your mover early rather than on the day. A crew can often start earlier, or shift by a day, if the conversation happens on Monday rather than Thursday night.
• Fill the car with fuel while the queues are short.
• If you are going ahead, get loaded and unloaded the same day rather than leaving anything on a truck overnight.

And if it turns and the day is fine after all, you have lost nothing but a couple of phone calls.

Planning a move for this summer or autumn?

Tell us the dates you are working with and how much give they have in them. That is the single most useful thing to know when we are putting a week together in September.

We cover Orlando, Oviedo, Brevard County, Volusia County and the rest of Central Florida.

(407) 987-2624.