We have moved.

Or so it seems. On Thursday, I asked Ben to call a moving company to get a rough estimate and find out when a good time would be to move. We ended up booking with them right away since they were guaranteeing a price (and trust me, we have enough stuff that a known maximum is a good thing!) and were available soon. We initially set up for the movers to come on Monday.

A short while later, it ended up changing so that they would both pack and move us on Friday. Yes, less than 24 hours after making the phone call. We figured that spending the extra money to have them pack would be well worth it since realistically we'd have had to hire a sitter to watch the girls while we packed. (Yes, I suppose we could have packed the entire house at night but we get little enough sleep as it is!)

The movers arrived an hour later than we'd thought and we were greeted by the comment, "There's no way we can move all this today!" Um, yes you can. That's why we booked you!

I will concede that these movers were awesome with our furniture. Other than shrink-wrapping our bookshelves WITH OUR BOOKS STILL IN THEM, I had no real complaints. I was amused that they were lifting our solid maple armoire with all of our music in it. They looked horrified when we told them that unit was going upstairs in the new house. Apparently it became much lighter once the music was all taken out. Go figure.

We were less than impressed with their (lack of) packing skills. We requested that only items from the same kitchen cupboards be packed together (kosher kitchen). Yet when I unpacked one box, I was astounded to find my toaster oven along with half of my Pesach dishes! (There was packing paper dividing them and yes, I possess a sense of humour.)

After the movers had been at the old house for a couple of hours, one of the men went upstairs to start packing our room. That's when he told us that we should get a marker if we wanted to label the boxes up there. WHAT?!?!? Yes, that's right. They packed our things and labelled NOTHING. Not one single box was labelled.

Wait. It gets better. Not only did they label nothing, they put all of the boxes stacked 5-6 high in the front playroom of the new house. And since our bananas were no longer on the counter at the old house, deductive reasoning informed me that they were somewhere inside one of those boxes. Fun times, I tell you.

One of the movers asked me if it was a problem for us to move some of our own stuff, ie. clothes, toys, etc. Um, yes. That's why we hired YOU. I was assured that they would come back for a second load. Yet when they finished unloading at the new house at 2:30 on Friday afternoon, they had us initial that everything was off the truck (well, it was), called in our credit card, and left. I hadn't been there the whole time so I was unaware of how much had been left behind. Ben is not confrontational by nature (I think that might be my biggest understatement of the year!) so the end result was that we had the equivalent of probably 6 vanloads of things still at the old house.

Full-service move? I think not. We told them how much stuff we had. It was not our fault that they didn't bring a big enough truck! In fact, unless we get rid of a lot of things (furniture included), we can't ever move ourselves again because we rented the biggest U-Haul they had last summer and our things barely fit!

After several irate phone calls, we have been assured that we did not pay the full price that we were initially quoted. I will believe it when I see it come through on my credit card.

So my summary of this moving company is:
*Furniture moving skills - honestly, excellent
*Packing skills - non-existent
*Manners - alternately rude, stupid, funny and entertaining
*Price - you get what you pay for

But now it is Sunday evening and here I sit in our new house surrounded by mystery boxes. Could life get any better than this?