Moving in Orléans

Orléans is a 30 km run from the west end and about 15 km from downtown, and the travel component of an hourly quote is the first thing to check on any move here. It is also, for a moving company, a border town: a large share of Orléans moves are either to or from Gatineau, and a river crossing turns a local move into an interprovincial one. That can change how the job is billed and what paperwork it needs, so say so when you ask for the quote.

The housing splits cleanly. Chapel Hill, Queenswood Heights and the streets north of St Joseph are largely 1970s and 1980s two-storeys and side-splits, with narrower stairwells, smaller door openings and the kind of tight basement stairs that decide whether a sofa comes apart. Avalon, Fallingbrook and Notting Hill, built from the mid-1990s on, have the wide garages and generous stairs of modern construction. Tell your estimator which half of Orléans you are in, because the crew size the job needs differs.

Older Orléans also has mature trees along the street, which sounds pleasant and is, until a five-tonne truck with a 3.9 m box has to get under a low limb to reach a driveway. It is worth a look up the street before booking a large truck.

The seasonal pattern out here is family-led rather than student-led, which means the crush is late June through August rather than the first of September, and December is genuinely quiet. A February move in Orléans is the cheapest booking of the year, and the only reason not to take it is the weather itself, which on the east end means wind off the river and a driveway that needs salting before the crew arrives.