Callan & Woodworth Moving & Storage

This move was like our own personal worst enemies maliciously packed our stuff, in an effort to cause the most work possible unpacking & reassembling.

We had moved with professional movers once before, so I took the time to go around the old house, putting up very basic signs to indicate where things would go in the new house. However, a large portion of the boxes were not labeled at all, as regards to originating room or contents.

When the boxes were delivered, they were literally opening a lot of them, and asking me which room to bring them to. However with six guys carrying things in to two different entrances, and only one of me, a good portion of the items were delivered to completely wrong areas of the house. For instance, I found food & kitchen items in the garage and basement.

Some of the boxes were labeled, but these did not all get to the correct destinations. We had a lot of boxes labeled “books”, and they even had markings of which rooms they originated in! However, rather than putting the books in the corresponding offices, or kids’ rooms, they were all put in the same place, leaving us to move boxes of books across the house & down stairs.

Part of the deal is that the movers are supposed to put back together whatever they had taken apart. The loose parts are supposed to be put into a “parts” box, and labeled for later assembly. We had two “parts” boxes, filled with miscellaneous items, but parts littered everywhere, to be lost and possibly found. I still have a mismatch of odd parts that I have found in random places, that I have no idea what they go to.

One of the movers showed me the baby’s crib parts, with slots falling out of the rails, and skeptically asked me if I would like him to put the crib back together. As they were leaving, I spotted the high chair sitting in the kitchen with no legs. I asked where the legs were, and one of them said definitively, “in the garage.” (The garage was packed solid with boxes and other random items at that point. I did have them find the legs & put that back together.)

They put the Lazy Boy back together, but left the screws out, so it was just loosely sitting together. We had an exercise trampoline & 3 of the 6 legs were with the trampoline part. The other 3 legs were (much later) miraculously found stuffed into tight little formed corners of a milk crate in the garage that had something else stuffed into it. An exercise ball had the plug pulled, never to be found.

In the old house, I had a stiff fabric box, with a lid Velcro-ed on, filled with mementos from the kids. It had school pictures, newspaper clippings mentioning them, magazines from when they were born, Christmas letters I have received, and silver coins they had received from their grandparents. The silver coins were packed tightly, so as not to rattle. I would have expected them to place this box in a moving box & move it as-is. Instead, it seemed to have been looted by professional thieves. Some of these items were stuffed inside a plastic bin with the kids’ slot cars (photos rumpled, etc.). Other items were found mixed in with other kids’ toys. The fabric box & the silver coins were never found.

Mountains and mountains of paper were used in this move, but no paper was used in some important places. Professional looking packing paper was used to wrap some of the kids’ wooden toys, but a delicate wood & brass wind-up Grandfather-style clock was tossed sideways into a box with no paper, next to some items from the garage. Two heavy glass mosaic mirrors were stacked, with no paper, on top of delicate music gear, that was found bent & dented. A box labeled “toiletries” contained loose makeup with tops falling off and pump-style lotions, not wrapped in any paper, on top of speaker wire and piano books from the living room.

I could continue on, if I had more space. Overall, I was highly disappointed. I do not recommend this company.