Hiring a Moving Company

Our many troubles with two different moving companies are chronicled in a footnote below. (See "Timeline of the Moving Nightmare.") This post lists what we have learned for hiring the next moving company (the one that moves us back to the States).

Sales People

The person who you deal with at the front end, before any contracts are signed, is only a sales person. Before you sign anything, find out who you else you will talk to in the chain (perhaps someone with a title like "moving consultant") and talk to them as well. It would also be helpful to talk to someone who is in charge, a manager of some kind.

Are the other people in the company easy to get in touch with? Do they respond quickly to answering machine messages and email? Do they tell you the same story about the moving process as the sales person?

We found this to be a problem with both moving companies we hired. What the sales person told us wasn't always what the others in the company believed to be true. Not that they were lying (or maybe they were), but it seemed more that the people in the company weren't speaking to each other. We also found that though the sales people were friendly and responded quickly to requests, this was often not true for anyone else in the company.

One thing that impressed me about the Dutch moving company, Dijkshoorn Euromovers, that contracted with Access to take care of the move on this side of the Atlantic was that they understood customer service. We went from weeks with absolutely no information to email and phone calls three or four times a day.

Paper work

The Dutch company seemed very competent. There was a lot of paperwork for Luxembourg, and they handled it all quite well.

We had been instructed by our sales person from both Sea & Air and Access to keep a list of everything that we pack ourselves because customs in Europe will need a list. It didn't need to be too specific, but should be labels such as "clothes", "toys", "dishes", etc. So we did that. I numbered the boxes with a big red marker, and we made the list. We gave it to the guys packing the house who were also keeping a list, using stickers to number the boxes. I didn't know exactly how they were going to reconcile their numbers with our numbers, but I didn't worry too much at the time.

As expected, the Luxembourg customs officials wanted to see the packing list, but they wanted it in French. Mark at Dijkshoorn said they would translate it for 150 Euros. We decided that we could do just as well because we knew our stuff, so Mark faxed the packing list to my office. The list from Access had someone else's name printed at the top for the "customer name", but that name was crossed off and ours written in by hand. Most of the items were labeled only as box. It was incredibly discouraging. We spent hours making up a packing list for 267 pieces, and then translating it into French. By thinking back to the list I had done for our packing, and then trying to remember the order they went in packing the house, we managed to come up with a decent packing list. A friend at work helped me fix the French. (He was quite amused at my French translations.)

Luxembourg customs requested a scan of the container before it was unloaded which cost us almost 300 Euros but couldn't be avoided. Mark at Dijkshoorn Euromovers said that would speed up the process at the border. Because of the fudged inventory list, if customs had wanted to find something specific they saw in the scan, it would have taken a very long time.

How much experience do the people you talk to have with customs? If they don't handle that part of the move, ask to speak to the person who knows. Who have they contracted with to work with customs on the other side of the ocean?

Also, make sure that you keep for yourself a list of the contents of the container. It could come in useful.

Packing

In a previous entry (highly recommended), my husband has given away all the trade secrets so that you can pack your own boxes. When we move back to the States, that is what we are going to do. No more hiring packers for our family!

Before the move, before the "professional" packers came, while we were packing our valuables and favorite toys, Darin was making us do an "ocean voyage test" on all the boxes, which meant shaking them and moving them like ocean waves to see if they rattled. The men who packed our things didn't worry at all about breakage. They put in lamps without any protection, which means we need new lamp shades. Though they wrapped the piano and china cabinet in blankets, other important furniture was left completely unprotected. Books were thrown into boxes, not even laid flat, so that a lot of our paperback books now have damaged pages and covers. Almost none of the boxes they packed were full. And then they have the nerve to tell us that our stuff is too big for a 40' container so they need an extra $4,000 for a larger container. They could have just filled the boxes and there would have been no question about the limits of a 40' container.

We are never going to hire packing done again. If you decide that you can't do all the packing yourself, make sure that you or someone you trust is there to watch and protect the most valuable things.

Fortunately, in spite of all the problems, we've seen very little breakage.

Our plans for moving back

We decided before we came that we are going to leave some of our furniture in Luxembourg. Some of our furniture is nothing special and completely replaceable. So our goal is to reduce down to a 20' container for the move back. With the arguments about whether our stuff would fit into a 40' container for the voyage to Luxembourg, we started to have our doubts about the 20' container. But now that we see how much empty space was in the boxes, and we see how much stuff we have already thrown away, given away (kids books and clothes), or recycled, we believe again that we can make it into a 20' container in a couple of years.

So for the next move, we want to contract only for the moving of a 20' shipping container. There are several companies that have prices for "You pack, we ship." We make sure that they are familiar with customs in the States, and we hire a company. I would hire Dijkshoorn Euromovers if they would give us a price for the self-packing method.

We order the container far in advance (a couple of weeks, at least) of the date we fly back. We make sure we have our boxes packed ourselves in advance of the container coming. We make sure that what is left will fit in our suitcases, meaning that we've also packed our suitcases. We load the container ourselves. Anything left in the house we arrange to go to the next tenants or a thrift store.

Of course, before we move back to the States, we have to decide where we'll be living.