Don’t do a blind quote. Get a survey and a binding quote. Surprises are not good when moving.
Oh yeah. I know not to do that. I’m just shocked at the low price. And I basic begged him to raise it 😂 we have two in person quotes scheduled for next week.
I use an organizing service and based on my organizer's conversations, I think they do this also. Their hourly rate to come organize my house is $85/hour with a 4 hour minimum, so somewhere around there would be my guess.
Can you share more about this? I’ve been thinking this is what I need for my house but afraid it was going to be too expensive.
I use an organizing service and based on my organizer's conversations, I think they do this also. Their hourly rate to come organize my house is $85/hour with a 4 hour minimum, so somewhere around there would be my guess.
Can you share more about this? I’ve been thinking this is what I need for my house but afraid it was going to be too expensive.
Someone suggested it to me on MMM last year when I posted that I was feeling really hopeless about so many things. That I should consider an organizing service. As of last summer, the 4th bedroom in our house was full of my stuff and a total mess. Some of it was stuff that had not been unpacked since we moved to the house 4 years prior. My laundry routine consisted of dumping all my dirty laundry in the washer, hanging it to dry (because the dryer didn't work, turns out the vents needed cleaning), dumping it all on the couch in that 4th bedroom, and then picking out clean clothes from the pile every day. Repeat, week after week. That room was supposed to turn into DS's room and needed to be repainted and carpeted before we could put him in there, but I never seemed to get a long uninterrupted chance to really devote to clearing it.
I googled something like "organizing service." A few links came up, I called 2. One lady came to my house and did a consultation, she is the one I ended up using. She charged $85 for the consult. She looked at all the disaster zones, took photos and said that they way it works is I hire the organizer to work in 4 hour blocks. It would be best if I worked with the organizer side by side to make decisions about everything because a ton of stuff had to be relocated or donated, etc. and she couldn't necessarily make those decisions without my input. It was upto me and my budget how often I wanted her to come. She also said that maintenance afterwards is important if we wanted to keep up with the results they could provide. The other person spoke with me on the phone and charged $90 per hour, 4 hour blocks and basically said the same thing.
That first day her person came, she walked into the disaster bedroom, sat down next to the clean laundry pile and started showing me how to fold my underwear into squares, almost like little packets. We re-homed the entire pile into the dresser. It felt so good for weeks afterwards to pull out a little packet of clean underwear from the official underwear drawer. It sounds so dumb but it made a huge psychological difference for me to finally see an end to the endless laundry pile. Once we did that bedroom, I decided she was going to help with other rooms in the house. She said she thinks about my house and how to make things better during her time away. Based on her thoughts, she suggested re-arranging the furniture in the family room and it really opened the room up. One day, we did the garage and went to town with the label maker labeling all the drawers & cabinets so that now I can send my husband or DD out there and say "read the labels and find it." I think we did like 10 sessions before the holidays came and I got tired. She will be returning next month so we can tackle the attic. We've mostly been able to keep up and maintain the stuff we organized, except when DS gets into things.
We just moved, NC to NJ. The old house was 2400ish square feet. We paid the movers to pack everything, move it, and set the furniture back up. The total cost was $10900. Of that, $1700 was for the actual packing. I had moved up before the rest of the family and trying to pack ourselves would have been too much.
Post by purplepenguin7 on Apr 20, 2021 9:03:04 GMT -5
sent, i didn't want to quote the whole thing but thank you!!! I really need this. Question, did you have to pay for additional supplies, storage boxes and other organizational stuff on top of the hourly rate?
Post by rupertpenny on Apr 20, 2021 15:57:34 GMT -5
I've had movers pack for me twice (one local move, one international move) and I kind of hated it both times. Unpacking was a nightmare because they just throw stuff in boxes willy nilly and pack EVERYTHING up to and including a full trash can one time. I love purging and am a control freak though.
I just did a local move last week and I rented plastic bins instead of using boxes. It was great, I'd highly recommend it.
Got out first onsite estimate. About $1000 for the packing part of it. $3500 total. So not an insignificant chunk, but still... not the $10grand I feared.
Post by basilosaurus on Apr 27, 2021 0:46:53 GMT -5
Military pays for moves to new assignments but not local moves, so I have experience with both.
Yeah, full service is really nice, but though a pita it really wasnt too terrible doing local hybrid moves.
We packed up boxes ourselves. Friends actually volunteered to help with boxes. Things like packing up the kitchen or bookshelves aren't really a burden if no one has to do heavy lifting. I put on good music and kept the wine flowing. Then I paid for a crew to move furniture and boxes. I can't remember price but certainly under 1k. One crew tried to claim going from one side of the island to the other was 2 hours because it's hard for their truck to go up the "mountain." Um, no, it's a 20 minutes drive with only a very short slight elevation. Like maybe 1k ft. I was pretty pissed since everyone paid by time, not project, in that region. I called the owner immediately after which I rarely do. There were other issues of incompetence, but that outright lie is what tipped me.
sent, i didn't want to quote the whole thing but thank you!!! I really need this. Question, did you have to pay for additional supplies, storage boxes and other organizational stuff on top of the hourly rate?
They tried to utilize whatever storage items I already owned. Otherwise I do have to purchase additional organizing items on my own or based on their suggestions. Like she suggested a lazy Susan thing to help organize a cabinet so I went to The Container Store and found one I liked. I think the fee includes an hour of their time researching and suggesting items but I haven’t done this yet.
Post by chickadee77 on Apr 27, 2021 8:49:21 GMT -5
Anecdote: Years ago (like, 20) we moved from TX to KY and got estimates, etc. - everything seemed fine, until the movers showed up and had no clue they were supposed to be packing us. We had to go out and get boxes and packing materials because they had nothing - in fact, they were pick-up workers (I hope that's not offensive - that's what we used to call them and I don't know another term) and had never packed anything before, so I ended up working alongside them. Finally, everything was loaded, and off they went. We did our own drive with the cats and other valuables that we wanted to transport in our cars, and when we got there, we tried to contact the company to "track" the truck - the company had no record of us. Not exactly sure what happened, but apparently somehow we got subcontracted out to an independent driver/mover or something.
Everything turned out fine, actually, but the absolute stress of it has made us leery of movers. We're actually in the process of a multi-phase cross-country move, and we're both so gun-shy we're just like, screw it, we're doing Pods (at least for the first phase) lol.
But my dream would be to just drive where we're going and have our shit magically appear.