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November 15, 2005
What Went Wrong
You hear a lot of moving horror stories: movers changing prices, holding stuff hostage, etc. Ours was unfortunately no different, or maybe it's a "Best Of". We'll cover the highlights in our first four-part feature, starting today with the movers.
The Movers
A few days before the move, Brandie called the mover to confirm our pickup window. They had guaranteed Wednesday or Thursday, which would allow us to fly out Thursday night and the new owner to take occupancy Friday. On the phone, after about a day of calls to sort out the confusion, we learned that National couldn't get a truck to our house on Thursday, so the local mover would have to pay out of his own pocket for his own truck to come empty our house.
Fortunately he held to the agreed dates and on Thursday the truck and crew showed up and got to work on our house. A few hours into it, one of our neighbors came over to tell us what a horrible experience she had had with this same mover seven years ago. Her hardwood floors had been ruined, and they raised the price on her three times during the move. She repeated this to the moving crew, none too gently.
A few minutes later, I noticed the moving crew foreman on his cell phone. When he got off, he had some bad news. "We're going to need to adjust the estimate," he said. The estimate, which had incorrectly included a full-size stainless refrigerator and 27" tv that weren't getting moved, was now somehow too low. Even though we had walked the estimator through our entire house, showed him everything we had and then gave away about half our belongings, the "not too exceed" price was no longer valid.
It was only going up $200 though, so we tried to remain optimistic, signed the altered agreement and went out to buy sandwiches for ourselves and the crew. They wrapped up around 3:30pm, which gave us about three hours to go ship some last items, throw away what remained, return some hardware to our cable provider and finish packing for the airport. Twenty minutes later my phone rang.
It was the owner of the moving company, very irate. They had just finished weighing the truck, and it was nearly 1000 pounds over the original estimate. Somehow this was our fault. We needed to drive down to his office and sign new paperwork for the new price, or National wouldn't take our stuff.
During the first price hike, the concern was that we had too many items. We hadn't used many big boxes (our estimate included 18) to pack, only three. The moving crew reassured us that the number of items didn't matter, it was only the final weight that impacted the price. Now it still wasn't clear whether it was a volume or a weight issue, but we agreed to stop by their office on the way to the airport to sign the new paperwork.
It was about then that we realized we had packed the hardware for Eula's crate on the moving truck. No one sells just the hardware, so we added a Petco visit to our list of things to do in just three hours. We raced through it all and made it to the mover's office around 6:30. We signed the new paperwork and met the driver, who promised to meet us in 7-14 days in New York. We then drove to meet John, handed off the last few things we couldn't pack or ship and made it to the airport on time.
Tomorrow we'll recount the misadventure with the car carrier, and hopefully post some pictures of our disastrous rental in Kingston.
Posted by Jacob at November 15, 2005 9:48 AM