Losing something that’s important to you puts a real damper on the excitement surrounding your move. But according to Kirk Hensler of Premier Relocations in Novi, Michigan, there are ways to avoid such losses and make sure every one of your items arrives safely at your new home. It takes cooperation, though, between the moving crew and the customer. Your job as the customer, he says, is to prepare your belongings properly for the move and then to verify that the moving company has done its job correctly.
Prepping for Your Move
You can increase the likelihood that nothing will get lost in your move by preparing your items well for the moving crew. This includes making sure everything is securely packed in advance, making sure items that are not to be moved are kept separate from other items, and placing items in highly visible areas that are easy to for moving crew members to access. Labeling your boxes clearly will also make items easier to find once they’ve arrived at your new home.
Once your moving day has arrived, says Hensler, you will want to take an active role in ensuring that the moving crew has located every item that needs to be moved. Once the truck has been loaded, you will want to conduct a walk-through of your entire home to make sure all rooms, including the basement, attic, garage and all closets, are completely empty.
Local Moves vs. Long-Distance Moves
Naturally, when you’re moving locally, the stakes are a bit lower than when you’re moving across the country. Although you will certainly do your best to ensure that everything is moved together, retrieving a left-behind box or vacuum cleaner is much more feasible from ten miles away than from 2,000. Local moves are much more straightforward from the moving company’s perspective, too.
“Essentially,” says Hensler, “a local move involves coming to your house, loading things onto a truck, driving the truck across town, and then unloading at your new home – usually the same day.” To make sure none of your items are lost in a local move, you simply need to a) make sure everything gets onto the truck, and then b) make sure everything comes back off of the truck.
Long-distance moves are different than local moves, says Hensler, in that your shipment of boxes and furniture will likely be sharing a truck with other customers’ shipments. In order to ensure that each item on the truck is delivered to its proper destination, inventory sheets are used. Your inventory sheet, Hensler explains, is a list of each item in your shipment. Every item is tagged with a sticker that corresponds to a number on the inventory sheet. At Premier Relocations, explains Hensler, a color-coded system is used whenever multiple shipments are to be loaded onto the same truck. According to Hensler, depending on the size of the shipments, it’s not uncommon for three or four different households’ items to be placed in a single trailer. In order to for the crew to be able to distinguish between the customers’ shipments, each shipment is assigned a single sticker color, and each shipment has its own inventory.
On move-in day, the inventory will be used to ensure that none of your items are left on the truck. As items are unloaded, the delivery crew will verify that each piece coming off the truck is labeled with the correct color. Usually, says Hensler, the customer will be asked to check individual items off of the inventory sheet as they are brought into the new home. If there are items on the inventory sheet left unchecked at the end of move-in day, it is easy to determine which items are still on the truck and to retrieve them. |
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