I liked the idea of hiring a company called One Good Woman Moving and Storage to do my packing and moving. The idea of a female-owned and perhaps female-operated moving business appealed to me.
The company's website is similarly appealing. There you'll see a picture of a nice-looking family, who take extra care to protect your property during the whole moving and relocation process. They say they have professional movers and drivers who will make sure your local or long distance move is trouble-free. They say if you need any items protected ALL of the materials to properly protect those goods are included (capital letters and bold appear on the website).
Extra care? Trouble free? All materials to protect your belongings? I'm afraid not. Based on my experience, you can expect a fair amount of heartache with this incompetent and dishonest company. And, apparently, my experience is not unique. The Better Business Bureau lists a string of formal complaints against this company during the past 12 months. I also notice that someone else posted a consumer complaints on this company just two days ago.
The 4-man team that partially packed (I pre-packed most boxes) and moved our apartment to a storage facility was friendly and polite. However, only the team leader had any packing skill. The other three were well-meaning, but insanely slow and inept. This is a big problem when paying an hourly rate.
Within the first hour, one packer broke the built-in wall shelving in the master bedroom. Another packer caused a substantial work delay when he accidentally locked and closed the master bathroom door. Another dropped glass beads from one of our few art pieces on the floor. Another (or was it the same one?) piled dish after heavy dish into a large box that clearly was not designed for heavy glassware.By the end, the box was so heavy, and so likely to break through and/or crush other boxes, that I had to repack it into multiple boxes myself.
Most of the packers didn't label the contents of the boxes they packed. As a result, I won't know which boxes belong in which rooms when I move the items from the storage facility, nor will I be able to retrieve contents from the boxes in storage.
The packers did not know how to seal boxes shut. A single piece of tape across the middle of a heavy box will not do. Sure enough, some of the boxes collapsed in on one another when the movers piled the boxes up in the storage unit.
Despite their written guarantee, the movers ran out of materials (e.G., bubble wrap) early on. I had to run out in the middle of this chaotic process to buy more. The movers didn't have any boxes to protect artwork. A set of framed pictures was piled into an open crate. My only original painting was entirely unprotected.indeed, the movers actually placed an ironing board against the painted side of the picture in the summer Atlanta heat for the ride to the storage facility. I am serious!
The move took many hours longer than it should have for reasons described here and because three of the four packers simply disappeared for hours under the guise of working on things in the truck. When contacted about these and numerous other problems, the owner was defensive and dishonest about the events that occurred. Ultimately, she offered a tiny discount, though she argued that the 38 man-hours that she charged for my simple move was appropriate.
My view, like that of so many others, is that One Good Woman Moving and Storage is One Good Company to Avoid.
Jonathan
Atlanta, Georgia
U.S.A.
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