Family's big move - in wheelie bins

1:13pm Friday 5th September 2008

Comments (7)   Have your say »

A DAD came up with a wheelie good idea to move his family to France – by packing all belongings in 46 green wheelie bins.

Steve Hill and wife Edite, 45, upped sticks and moved from their home of 25 years in Penn Road, Hazlemere, to south west France after buying the bins from a wholesaler.

The pair now run two holiday homes in the village of Touffailles and the trusty wheelie bins are still in action, now being used as either water butts or storage.

Speaking from France, Steve, 54, said: “Now they’re all here, I don’t know what I’m going to do with them.

“People have joked and said I’m going to put them on eBay. But I don’t think I’ll put them on eBay because they’re too valuable to me as storage.

“They’re still going to be featured for a long time. They’re just going to be here doing lots of different jobs.”

Some of the 46 bins, however, have yet to be unpacked and are gradually being emptied of books, crockery and clothes, he added.

Steve, who still runs a Citroen restoration business in High Wycombe, said his decision for choosing wheelie bins over traditional cardboard boxes seemed a “logical thing to do”.

“I needed more space so that I could move and sort the house from the garage,” he added. “Wheelie bins are perfect because they’re water proof, rodent proof and weather proof. That’s as simple as it really is.”

He still pops back to Bucks, after the move to France, to work at the garage in Cedar Terrace for a month at a time. His son Tomass, 25, still lives in the town while daughter Jolanta, 19, is studying at De Montfort University in Leicester.

The wheelie bins, which Steve bought for £20 each from wholesalers Costco, were filled and then stored in his garden before the move across the Channel.

He asked overseas removal firm Burke Bros, based in Wolverhampton, to transfer his bins to France and they accepted the unusual request.

Gary Burke, head of Burke Bros, said: “I went down to see him and I was just amazed. It looked like lots of little Daleks.

“All we had to do was wheel them on. It was a novel way of doing it.”

Gary estimated Steve had managed to fit four box loads of items into one wheelie bin making it an easy job for his men.