Williams Moving and Storage

How did it go? Not well.
The office staff at Williams were professional and courteous throughout despite all their double talk.
They continuously changed dates of service for pick up and delivery.
When the movers finally showed up two hours late from the time promised then the first thing they did was back their truck into the phone and electrical lines that supplied the house. This was done by backing up on our lawn beyond our walk way on to the soft ground leaving ruts that had to be filled in later. The moving crew thought the whole thing was funny and blamed us for not properly marking the lines. We immediatley called the Williams office who said our home ownbers insurance would have to take care of the repairs. The moving crew did not seem concerned to work around live wires lying on the ground. The electric company arrived later that evening to do the repairs.
During the entire move the supervisor complained that we had too many items to move and everyone except for the newewr employees had an attitude. Our house floors was completely trashed with mud from them not wiping their feet or putting down cardboard when the went in and out of the house..................this cost us about four hours in clean up after they left.
I am not a professional mover but have moved and helped other families move many times in the past and it appeared that these fellows just did not use any common sense or forethought when going about moving large pieces of furniture. We had most all our wood furniture chipped, split or marred from dropping, sliding and banging against walls and door jams. When they moved our large couch and organ out of the house they busted out the left side of our front door jam and separated the door from the hinges............another repair we had to do but it was quite funny to most of the crew (one newer guy did say he was sorry).
Our move consisted of our clothing, personal property, furniture, glasswear, pitctures, antiques, family heirlooms, high end mechanic tools and wood working equipemnt as well as high end sewing and quilting machines and equipment (no items moved were junk or replcaeables). The move was from northern Pennsylvania to Ontario, Canada.
The details in our contract were specific to the responsibilities of the customer and of the moving company namely itemizing all articles and containers with a description and catalog number stamp. This itemizing and cataloging was only done on a few items and aftern an hour the supervisor said he was just going to tag things since we had a big move and they would not meet their deadline taking a detailed inventory. By the end of the day the crew were just grabbing and tagging items in our house and carrying them to their trucks........................many of those items we had to retrieve from the trucks since they were not in the move nor designated as such. We had to caution the crew not to throw our items onto the trucks and had to continuously remmind them to be careful with the antique heirlooms and the sensitive sewing and quilting equipment.
Our items ended up being stored at some warehouse where some of our clothing packed in cardboard boxes got rat chewed and wood on our furniture mildewed.
From the warehouse a United Van Lines independent contractor loaded our items onto his tractor trailer and delivered them to our new home in Ontario. This man was a professional for whom we only have praise for his work and attention to detail as well as care for our property. The United Van Lines contratcor was not affiliated with Williams Moving. It was quite interesting that this one man with two hired local helpers could do the whole moving process in reverse without breaking or marring any of our furniture or other items. The United Van Lines contractor commented about how poorly our property was handled and on the amount of needless damage as well as the less than proper storage they were placed in at The Williams warehouse. The United Van Lines contractor went over in detailall of our papers and inventory and pointed our that Williams just tagged boxes , containes, and items and did not give a description.................he also pointed us in the direction for in insurance claims.
In the end were wound up with four boxes of other peoples property. Some of which were family heirloom items. We did our best totrack these folks down on Google and had a Williams contratcor pick up one box but never came back for the rest.........so other folks like us will never see some of their family heirlooms again. We personally were missing more than one dozen boxes and containers...........not surprisingly the most valuable containing antiques and tools. Our total insurance claim well exceeds the big deductable and we are vigourously prosecuting that claim.
We did not expect everything to come through the move unscathed and expected perhaps one or two items to be lost. But what we got with all the damage and missing items through Williams moving us was beyond imagination especially since their publicized online reviews were fairly good compared to other companies.