House Move........"The Movers"

We got a couple of quotes in for the movers and decided to go with a well known company this time, as the ones we had used before and had, had no problem with gave me a strange quote which didn't give me a warm and fuzzy feeling.  I would live to regret that decision.

So the movers turned up half and hour late, but never mind.  I described the guys in the House Move Part 1 post, so no need to do it again.

The guy who was a millionaire kept going on and on about how well they were protecting everything etc........okay but that is your job.  However, when loading up the boxes and everything I kept saying to dh he was rough.  If you read the house move posts you'll know that they had to store our stuff overnight in their trailer in bitter cold temperatures.

When they came the next day I was relieved to see the millionaire guy wasn't with them and commented to the boss of the guys I honestly though he (millionaire guy) was colour blind as despite me writing FRAGILE in big red letters he wasn't very careful.  

One guy was eating Dorito's while they were moving stuff into the house.  There were Doritos everywhere!.  They moved everything in and then left.  We were glad to see the back of them and were able to sit down in our comfy chairs.

The next day was when we started to discover all the issues.  Despite me marking all the boxes as to what room they were to go in and telling them what room was what most things didn't end up where they were supposed to go.

The last thing from our old house into the moving van and the first thing out of the moving van at the new house was our treadmill............it was damaged, thankfully only cosmetically, no mention though from them about damaging it.  I had/have a stainless steel toaster oven, big ding in that and no mention from them about damaging it.  There are shelves up in the basement family room.  I was standing on a ladder for something down there and saw something on one of the shelves.  Went over to look at it and it was a piece of wood.  Just happened to look down and saw my wooden cd cabinet below with a broken top.  On the carpet were wood splinters from the cd cabinet.  They had broken it and "hidden" the piece of wood on the shelf and again no mention made of damaging it.  Curtain pole, bent so couldn't use that.  Broke a piece off my washing/laundry basket, hid the piece in a box; when I emptied the box I couldn't for the life of me figure out what that piece was for......until I saw my laundry basket later.

Put in a claim with the movers and got just under $170 out of them, which wasn't enough, but by this point I was done with the whole nightmare.

As I pointed out to them in the office, it was something you would expect from children hiding things they had broken, not adults who are employed with a supposedly reputable company...........as at the end of the day I was more fed up with the fact that they didn't tell us what they had damaged.  Movers have broken things before as accidents do happen but in this case they were just not being careful.

Fast forward to February I decide to hook up the treadmill and guess what no safety key.........another thing missing from the move.  Luckily when I called the treadmill company they mailed me a safety key for free as it turns out they ALWAYS go missing in a move according to a company rep.

We commented on the fact when we moved from Britain to Canada we moved all our stuff over with us and there was only one broken glass and no damage to anything else.  These guys I wouldn't recommend them to move a plant never mind a house full of furniture........

Guess it all could have been worse........not sure how though!

Ice Storm

We had a nasty ice storm on Thursday/Friday, which resulted in us having our hydro/electricity out for around 24 hours. This was the view from the dining room window when I got up on Friday:

All the windows to the east of the house were like this covered in ice.

When the ice started to melt on Friday afternoon, that's when the damage began:

It looks as though the poor tree is bleeding:

This in one of the willows by the road, so much too clean up; it's hard to see it though:

This tree has lost it's top:

One of the hardest things for us, is that our well is powered by electricity, so we had only the water that was in the pipes.  Also dh's sleep apnea machine is powered by electricity, so he had a restless night as well.  In the scheme of things ours was a minor inconvenience!

On Thursday night we went to the Drawing for Art function and it was a lovely but long night.  We were all chosen near the end, so none of us got what we really wanted but we all got something.  I was lucky enough to get a painting by the artist George Mocanu.  You can view the painting here.  The one I got was called Mountain Landscape and it's on the third row on the right.  Dd got on by an up and coming artist called Pete Smith, or so the curator of the gallery told her?  This is all I could find about him  

I have published another couple of book reviews here  Managed to get some reading done while the hydro was out!!!