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[personal profile] cos

Need advice on using moving companies or container/pod companies for moving cross country! Also recommendations if any of you have had good or bad experiences with some.

Our move is a bit unusual. We're going to vacate our Seattle apartment in a couple of months and move a bunch of the stuff (though not all) to Cambridge, where we already have a fully furnished and supplied house. We've been living partly in both locations for several years, and we're going to Cambridge full time. Which means two things that make this a bit different from a "typical" cross country move:

1 - We're selling or giving away a significant portion of our Seattle furniture, though we do want to send a few pieces back to Cambridge. So in terms of furniture, this will probably be much less weight and volume than a regular apartment, even a 1-bedroom.

2 - Not only do we not need the stuff to arrive quickly - we've spent whole months in Cambridge without any of our Seattle stuff, we have what we need there already - but it would actually be better if we could be sure it doesn't arrive in under 3 weeks. That's because we want to drive our Seattle car to Cambridge, and want to make a nice road trip of it, so we don't want to have a tight deadline about when we have to be in Cambridge to receive our stuff.

Neither of us have done a cross country move before. I've read stuff online about how to avoid scams, and about the differences between full service movers and containers, but there's a lot that's not clear, and most of the "how to move cross country" articles online spend most of their time on things that aren't relevant to our move.

Examples of some of the sorts of questions I still have:

  • Do shipped containers come in sizes that we could place on a residential street in Cambridge, and do we arrange that with the city or do those companies do it (and are they reliable at it)?
  • Are there any full service movers who are willing to commit to delivering our stuff more than two weeks later - or ideally more than three? Or do we have to go with a container if we want that?
  • With a container, can they select and hire movers to pack and load on one side, and unload on the other? How do we find companies that know how to select movers who are good at packing for cross-country shipping, which I gather is different than packing a moving van for the same city?
  • Full service movers offer insurance for anything they pack. But what about if we use a container and they (or we?) hire separate movers to pack and load - how does insurance work in that case?

And, of course, what companies should we consider? Ones that people have had good experiences with.

While we don't want to spend a lot more money than necessary if it doesn't provide value, we're totally willing to spend more money if it makes things better. Finding the cheapest option isn't the top priority for us. And we're not considering driving a truck ourselves, we want to drive the car, which doesn't have a lot of space.

Edit: I forgot to ask earlier - several articles I read said that some warning signs of a bad or scammy mover are a) they won't accept credit cards for payment, and b) they require a large deposit up front, instead of asking for the bulk of the money after the move is done. So I'm curious, if you have direct experience with cross county moves, whether you know if your mover accepted credit cards for all payments? And did you have to pay a deposit up front, and if so, approximately what proportion of the total it was?

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