Recommended Movers?
Can you recommend a good moving company? I'm talking right now to Movex, so I'd be especially interested in hearing about experiences with them. Basically, we would like a self-service move, in which we load and unload the truck, and all they do is drive it. The Movex deal sounds okay, but they expect us to measure the amount of truck space we end up using, and I'm not sure I'd be so good at that, unless they have markers on the walls of the truck or something. They also expect us to build a bulkhead wall out of materials they provide so that our stuff is kept in a private compartment. Is this easier than it sounds? I wish we could just get our own truck.
Comments
Trucks
What's the problem with getting your own truck?
Two Cultures
Time & too much stuff...oh, and panic attacks
Neither of us feels comfortable driving a truck that's the size we'd need to haul our stuff. Plus we have to drive our cars there, too. If we got our own truck, we'd have to do an initial trip up there, taking two cars and leaving one there. Then a second trip taking the truck and the other car. We don't want to hitch cars up to anything, either.
So, you know, dissertation defense imminent, the panic attacks I regularly get when driving on the interstate* etc. = get someone else to drive the truck.
* I avoid the interstate at almost all costs -- especially merging onto it in a city. I just won't do it. For this drive, I'm going to plot a route so that I can take some other road to a town ~80 miles east of Atlanta and get on I-20 from there. Yesterday I had to drive from Florence, AL to Atlanta, and it just about killed me.
Argh. Duh.
You're still talking about having them drive the truck. Well, okay, now you know why we're not doing the Penske thing.
Okay, so I don't really know why we can't get our own truck. They just don't do it that way. They're actually, it sounds like, going to bring us a trailer for our stuff -- if we end up using Movex.
By the way...
Jonathan used to drive the big rigs, but the government won't allow him to do it anymore on account of he was too good.
PODS might be just what the
PODS might be just what the rhetorician ordered. http://www.pods.com/
http://www.movingscam.com/
http://www.movingscam.com/ read this then think again.
It's not that bad
I drove a 22 foot U-Haul here from Gainesville three years ago Friday. It wasn't much fun, especially given that the A/C was broke, but it wasn't that hard, either.
Also, I didn't do the math, but as we packed I figured out quickly that some stuff was just not worth moving.
Oh I can truck--didn't you
Oh I can truck--didn't you pay no attention to what Clancy was saying?
I reckon we can get two twenty-six foot trucks, load our stuff into one and drive the cars up in the other. Then I'll tow the one behind the other.
CDLs and cars and dollies
I don't quite get what the issue is: if you've got the CDL chops, Jonathan, why not use them? Rent a 24-footer, put all the stuff in it, put one car on a dolly behind it, and Clancy goes ahead in her car to get the place ready. It's what I did in a move from Pittsburgh to Western Massachusetts, and it worked fine. And being back up in the high seat actually felt kinda good, as long as I stayed in the right lane and didn't worry about the 14 hours it took.
You don't even need the class A or class B for anything that size, IIRC. A class C is fine.
Mike
Towing a car behind a truck
Towing a car behind a truck that large through I-285 to I-85 out of Atlanta is not for me (an unacknowledged source on McPhee's recent "Annals of Trucking"). I came within inches of a major wreck in a thunderstorm yesterday in a sixteen foot truck towing nothing on the I-65/I-20 interchange in Birmingham, which isn't half as busy as Atlanta.
Metaphysically, I distrust the towing concept. The non-autonomous mobility of the towed object thwarts its essential throwness, I find. There are various German compounds one may deploy.
Movex, etc.
I gotta say I see no reason to drive a truck on a long move. I've used Movex and Move America once apiece and had a great experience both times. They saved me money: I estimate that Move America ended up costing about $1200 less than a U-Haul, given the latter's mileage fees, fuel costs, etc. And I got to drive my car all of the way from Washington to New Hampshire (for the record, I don't think a truck is all that *hard* to drive, really... it's just a shitty experience).
I managed to fit my entire apartment (including couch, books and shelves, TV, queen bed, etc.) into six feet of truck space. Of course I nearly killed myself stacking it up to the ceiling. By the way, they do have markers and strap-holders (for lack of a more technical term) at regular intervals.
Trailers and Traffic
Gotcha re the traffic, and I hadn't thought about that: there are geographic locales where I definitely wouldn't want to have to maneuver a cube van with a car in tow at high speeds. (Hello, Boston.) There's an informal society among Army truckers of self-acknowledged fools who've tried to drive a 12-foot-high armored vehicle under an 11-foot bridge, to spectacular results.
And, yeah, the shorter the towed item is, the harder it is to maneuver. I've alley-backed a 55-foot reefer van in 15 seconds, and took 10 minutes of cussing to get my tiny little Sentra-on-a-dolly where I wanted it.
Mike
Decided on ABF U-Pack
I did a search for "do not use movex" and found quite a few horror stories, some of which are here, whereas I haven't found one single complaint against ABF. Plus, ABF has offices in Atlanta and Raleigh, and Movex only has the one in Tampa, FL.