Yesterday marked the final day in the long process of getting into our new home here in Grenoble. It did not go as well as we wanted. We had asked around for recommendations for moving companies, and got conflicting reviews of the company we eventually chose — we chose it because their quote was half of the other company’s. Lesson learnt: if you get conflicting reviews, believe the person who had bad experience.
During our move we are staying at a Airbnb accommodation in La Tronche, a lovely small village just across the river.
The move was supposed to start between 8am and 8:30am, but the movers did not show up until 9am.
Then it took them more than an hour to figure out how to set up the lift (we were moving through the window from the 4th floor apartment). They couldn’t park it on the street, since they would have blocked the traffic for the whole day. They couldn’t park it on our courtyard, since the building management had permanently locked half of the gate in order to prevent parking there, and they refused to give the lock code to our movers. The movers had to wait for someone from the management office to come and open the lock. A lot of precious time wasted.
Finally the movers got started. One guy was packing our stuff (that we had not packed ourselves) while the other two were operating the lift and transporting our stuff to the truck. But then it was the lunch time.
The move was stalled for an hour and a half, and resumed at 1:30pm. Around 3pm. they came to tell us that they cannot move us in today, since they started so late. We are like “Nooo, you have to!” This meant they started rushing, and did not protect our things properly. We called their office, and we were told that the move had to happen today. What happened for the next hour or so was phone calls back and forth — between the office and the movers, from us to the office but they didn’t answer or call us back, so we had no idea what was going on.
The movers just loitered around the truck talking to each other, or on the phone — at some point we saw one of the guys sitting on our (unprotected) chair smoking. We tried to reach the office but they didn’t answer, so Tomi walked over there. He came back with some sort of a boss. Then things started to happen. The guys loaded the rest of our stuff into the truck, and we left the empty apartment and went to our new place to receive the load. It was 5pm.
When the moving truck arrived we saw that the whole moving crew had changed. The unloading phase took less than three hours, and happened without an incident. Again they moved us through a balcony door to 5th floor, which caused some disgruntled comments from the residents because of the noise and blocked driveway for three hours.
The only damage we saw was when a piece of furniture hit the baseboard (loosely attached) and chipped off some newly painted wall.
The negative recommendations of this company we received were because they had outsourced the work. In our quote it said “NOUS NOUS ENGAGEONS A NE PAS EFFECTUER DE SOUS-TRAITANCE.”
To me it seems (now) that the company nothing but outsources, since they don’t have their own moving staff. And the quality of the work just depends on which crew they happen to get.
The last step of our move is the move-out inspection tomorrow, which I am a bit scared of, but I hope it does not deserve a whole blog post of its own.
To call it a night, here are some early evening views from our new home:
