Originally Posted by
11.4
More fodder.
I've moved a dozen times or more in my career. So a few comments:
1. There's not that much difference, in my experience, between pods and national movers if you factor in the cost of having furniture properly wrapped, speed of transit (which means hotel rooms while you wait), and so on.
2. Insurance: Definitely, absolutely. As mentioned above, get insurance that specifically covers your items for replacement cost. Most movers' policies only cover specifically named items or only cover at a minimal rate. Feel free to get insurance from someone other than the mover -- his insurance will favor him in any disputes.
3. Do your own packing of boxes. Leave the rest to the pros. A national mover will wrap each piece of furniture in blankets and then cover that in plastic wrap. This makes sure they really stay dry. Your move may require that your goods be moved from one truck to another part-way, and I've found that's usually an opportunity for pieces to be damaged or subject to rain. Get consistent sized-boxes because they stack well and the contents come through better. Don't use recycled grocery store boxes or the like. Home Depot heavy duty moving boxes are cheap and very good quality. I have some that have been through four moves and still are fine.
4. Start collecting bike boxes from your local shop. Don't take trashed or cut-up ones, but save the good ones, especially the thicker ones. They are superb for packing framed art, your flat screen TV, bulky items like garden implements, mirrors, and the like, plus, of course, bikes.
5. Put your own inventory number on each box or piece of furniture and have the mover match that number to his own when he's loading. Their descriptions on their sheets are always vague, but if you have that kind of identification, it makes it easier to figure out what might be missing. If the move has to change trucks, there's a huge opportunity for pieces of your stuff to go with whoever else is in the truck.
6. Know your driver. Check him out because that's what really determines how your load is treated. He should be with you end to end and just hire people locally to load and unload your goods. A good driver, especially a husband/wife pair who travel together, is much better than any national name on the side of the truck.
7. Pack your own stuff that goes in boxes. The furniture, leave to them. Pack bigger stuff in bike boxes. For smaller framed stuff, get a bunch of priority mail or Fedex flat document boxes and put one piece in each box, then put a bunch of the boxes in a larger packing box. The pieces are protected and always come through safely. You're charged on weight, so feel free to use volume to protect your goods as much as possible.
8. Don't bother with bubble wrap. It's expensive and doesn't work as well. Get 20-30 lbs of shipping paper from your mover and use it everywhere. It works superbly.
9. For tape I have fallen in love with the 4-inch heavy duty packing tape from U-line. It's expensive, but you can use one strip to seal a box and it's more secure than the 2-inch stuff you usually find. It needs a separate hand-dispenser but they aren't expensive.
10. Have a hand-truck to move your boxes around. Sort them by bottom, middle, and top, so fragile stuff always gets placed on top. And have fragile labels for all the stuff that goes on top. And label your boxes well -- not just "bathroom" but "prescription meds" or "dog grooming" and the like.
11. Take photos of everything before the movers arrive, during packing, and when they're unwrapped. That way you have evidence to support a tear or other damage.
12. Assume you're on your own with the move because you won't get easy help from the moving company if you incur damage. Same for their insurer. Their insurance contracts are opaque -- the language is intentionally almost impossible to read and exceptions and procedures to assign value are highly disputable. That's why I suggest you go to a separate, credible insurer. Counting them up, in thirteen moves I've had two moving companies who I actually trusted, six drivers out of thirteen, and one mover-supplied insurer out of seven they supplied. All of my independent insurers were trustworthy.
13. Unpacking is never fast and you usually need stuff faster. I go to Target and buy big clear Rubbermaid bins (about 24x16x32 inches) and use those to pack clothing, bathroom materials, and so on -- the stuff you need fast. Tape the bins closed. They are cheap and much better if you have to put a row of them in your bedroom to sort through clothes until everything is in place. I now have about thirty of them and frankly almost everything I have from the bedroom, bath, and kitchen goes into them. Boxes are used for books, art, lamps, etc.
14. For bikes, pack them yourself. Get good quality bike boxes. Don't try to get everything into a single bike box -- again, you pay for weight, not bulk. In a high quality bike box just get the frame with the crankset, wheels and bars removed. Pack those separately. If you have several bikes like I always seem to, pack the parts and wheels in frame boxes as well. Around a frame, insert some USPS medium or large flat rate boxes, put together and taped up. They don't damage your frame and they work well as spacers to keep the frame from getting crushed. A big heavy duty plastic bag does better than bubble wrap to protect your bike finish when you pack it. Just use some foam pipe insulation in larger sizes to protect the main tubes and fork. Whenever you put foam or any other packing around your frame, I have pieces of heavy duty plastic (like from a cut-up Hefty trash bag) against the frame itself with the foam over it so there's no adhesive or anything weird that affects the paint finish on the frame.