Don’t use anything but one of the majors. And even then, you can have problems. We had a very bad cross-country move experience from a major mover, but I think our experience was atypical.
Basically it all comes down to the skill of the guys that show up to pack your stuff. This varies WIDELY; they contract out so it’s impossible to say even for a major. Sometimes they’ll have sketchy labor show up, or you might get lucky and get a pro. My advice:
ABSOLUTELY be there for the packing phase and watch everything they do. I mean CLOSELY! This will give you some idea as to their competency, hopefully.
if you own anything that is weird/unusual/precious, either pack it yourself, or be prepared to babysit them as they pack that item.
They loaded the truck poorly, and we had $4k+ in damages. The resolved settlement was around $2500, and the guy who inspected our claim said it was the most damage he had ever seen in a move.
Again: it’s all about the quality of the guys who load the crap in the truck.
I just had a company take all my stuff out of storage in the UK, repack it after checking for rocket launchers, and ship it to New York. I was absent for all of it. No issues… my gaming PC made it intact :)
I appreciate the input but the moving itself is covered. We’re only going across town and we have a great mover lined up with tons of good references.
Does anyone have any pricing info they would be willing to share for having them pack everything up? Is it basically double the cost of the move or … ?
HELL no. :) No, Sandra has always wanted to live inside the beltline and has been skimming the real estate sites for the past year looking for a good deal on a nice house. She saw this one and with Gears2 having just shipped it seemed like the stars were aligning nicely to make the move.
The new house has twice the square footage of our current one so we shouldn’t have a need to move for a loooong time after this.
Well, actually, we might get another cat so that would technically qualify as expanding the family…
I feel sorry for folks who don’t live in the Boston/New England area, and therefore don’t have easy access to Gentle Giant. I’m sure someone out there has to have had a bad experience with them, but I know of them through about a dozen moves now (1 for me, the others for friends, and I mean people I actually know, not a friend of a friend’s cousin’s babysitter’s doctor) and they’ve always been great.
I will simply say that when I was moved to LA by work, a large number of my PS2 games disappeared in the process. In alphabetical order. K through N. A section of the couch was also broken, and the stuff arrived six days late.
Never again. Numbered, sealed boxes with no indication as to what’s in them is the way to go for me from now on.
I definitely recommend having some stuff packed. Last time I moved, I had them pack just the kitchen, which was the part I found most annoying on previous moves.
Shopping around for quotes and reviews of companies should be second nature by now for these types of things.
I’ll say the only experience I’ve had with movers who pack your stuff (I was in college and my parents were moving) was a very good experience. They came in, neatly packed everything and labeled the boxes by the type of room they were in, and everything got shipped properly with nothing lost or destroyed. These guys looked like roughnecks too, muscular with tattoos and scruffy hair, but they were very polite and did their job well.
Of course, the family was there managing some of the work and keeping an eye on things, so I can’t say that nothing would have gone wrong if they were there by themselves. I imagine anyone moving would want to be there, though.
And I’m going to break my own advice because I don’t remember the name of the company :(
We went with a no-name mover when we moved from California to Vermont. The packing went fine… We hired a local company that specialized in that kind of stuff.
They:
Hired local illegal workers to load the truck
Were six weeks late with our stuff, due to putting it in a warehouse until they could route a truck up through Vermont
At one point tried to claim they couldn’t drive all the way up to Vermont in the first place (after our stuff was already in the warehouse)
Last time we moved, it was an in-town move from our temporary apartment back into our just remodeled house, so there wasn’t a lot of stuff to move. Whoever just said they got the movers to pack the kitchen had it right on. I was heavily pregnant (like 3 days before due date) so couldn’t really do much other than wobble around watching other people work. Having them pack the kitchen was awesome, they were 10x faster than any normal human, and nothing got broken. We used a local company in LA called Curtis Movers. I don’t remember the cost unfortunately.
My move from NJ to MA some years ago was fine. If I had known how good the movers would be, I wouldn’t have done nearly so much work myself. If you get the fragile stuff out the way (and no doubt even if you don’t), they can go through a house like a storm, it’s amazing how fast they can be.
For some bizarre reason US Van Lines (courtesy of GTE who paid for the relocation) deadheaded a truck all the way from Bakersfield California to New Jersey to move my stuff up to Massachusetts. Two little guys with comical valley accents managed my furniture and my remaining unboxed stuff very efficiently indeed. They must have driven a total of 6,000 miles to perform my 250 mile move…
Excellent experience, would move again, A+++++++++++++++
Having the movers pack and move us was some of the best money I’ve ever spent. Zero breakage, zero theft, and they had us moved across town in under 8 hours with everything inside the new house and the furniture re-assembled. Beautiful!
We had the same experience. One caution: You have to tell them specifically what not to pack. They will pack up your garbage and move it unless you tell them not to.
100% the cost of paying movers to pack and then unpack your stuff is worth it. The bonus is that they take away all the packing material and boxes on the delivery side, which is always a huge hassle.
