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Comment by vemom | Hacker News Reader

A good removalist will come and quote and figure it all out. They'll discuss what you need to do to protect things and who will do it. You pay on delivery so at least there is the option to not pay.

Any company that subcontracts as a surprise is shit. My MO now is if I get a surprise subby for any job, from coding to paving to moving I am going to tell them to fuck off. It ain't a good sign.

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At least here in italy subcontracting has worse conditions than the regular workers as well, both for wage and safety. We're having a referendum where that, if passed, could make the parent company liable if they subcontract and a worker gets injured. It absolutely makes sense to me to hold a company accountable if it knowingly subcontracts to shady shell companies so they don't have to care about safety and can pay workers less

Trouble is with moving you're kinda screwed, unless you want to squat in your buyer's house while you find another solution.

Incredibly helpful to have buffer days if you can manage it. A very short rent-back agreement for a few days smooths out a lot.

Yeah, create overlap in some fashion. Anything with zero margin is error prone.

I agree and definitely makes things easier. The other way is like in England where it's common for the entire chain to exchange contracts on moving day. Means anything can go wrong right up until the last minute, but if it does at least you still have your things in your house. Maybe the US is more like Scotland where contracts are exchanged ahead of time.

We sucked up an extra month's rent to have overlap on our move just across a small metro area to the older house we'd bought, and it was worth every penny - we had time to repaint some walls and refinish the living room floor before our furniture was moved in (local moving services in Germany are quite different from the nightmares I'm hearing about here)

Alas, from TFA:

> I had to have everything out that day, so there wasn’t any choice

Eh, they’ll do that, and then they’ll decide that they can make more by just stealing all of your stuff and selling it overseas anyway.

Happened to me 20 years ago. They vanished off the face of the earth - I only figured out what happened because I found the motorbike on a Dutch auction site. The rest of it - furniture that had been in the family since the 1700s, etc., just gone.

Tracked down their lawyer, who informed me that they had burned him too.

Never got any of it back.

Now, I just rent a truck and do it myself, as it seems that pretty much all removers are charlatans and crooks.

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