Tag: movers

Getting ready for our move to France – first round

/ Matt Talley / 1 Comment

We/I have some serious work to do before we move to France for two years and we have a list of stuff that needs to happen. Here is the initial “to-do” post:

The Lawn:
The Nana is going to be moving into our house and will be puttering around the yard, planting flowers and the like, but there is no way that she will be pruning trees, cutting the lawn, weed eating, edging, or pulling pine needles out of the gutters. There is a little time, so we have contracted a crew to start taking are of the lawn now so that any kinks will be worked out.

In the spirit of full disclosure, the timing of this yard work transition was set into full motion only when my lawnmower blew up. Really, really – kaboom! As in there was a silver dollar-sized hole in the side of the piston housing and oil spewed everywhere. Right up until that moment the lawn caed transition was just a good idea. After it died, I threw it in the back of the truck, so it wouldn’t leak anymore oil on my grass and called the lawn service. There were a couple of things after their 1st visit, that I would like done differently, but on the whole, so far so good.

Projects:
The Kitchen HAS TO BE COMPLETED. I have stopped working on my Basement of Doom, the Campaign Camping Furniture, wood turning and a couple of refinish projects until the kitchen is complete. I will work down from there and not take on ANY new projects. I have two chests of drawers and a Duncan Phyfe Table that I want to complete and sell so that I am not storing them.

Shop:
I hate my table saw. I am going to out the beast on Craig’s List along with my contractor’s saw (Just collects spiders and sawdust), 12″ band-saw, small joiner, small drill press and the miter-box saw. None of them will work in France (50Hz vs. 60Hz power issues), so I can’t take’em with me. They are all old and have had a good life with me. It is time that I pass them on to new homes where they will see less use and live out their golden years making soapbox derby cars and bird feeders. I am planning to use any money made to invest in both some quality carving chisels and I will save part for the down payment on all new, cabinet shop-quality, power tools when we return to the US.

I can’t not build stuff, so I am taking the Anarchist’s Tool Chest route and am taking a rebuilt an old ammo/tool box (see evolution in pictures below) into a more useful tool travel case and will then show up in France with planes (22 of them), carving knives, mallets, hand saws, chisels, etc… The plan is to make smaller more detailed items, mostly by hand, while I am there (I will be sourcing a lathe and doing some bowl work though…).

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Some Big News…

/ Matt Talley / Leave a comment

So… My J-O-B has made us an offer that is very hard to refuse: a two year stint in the south of France and they will fly us home 3 times a year. We get to keep our house and I get to come back to my job in Seattle when that period ends. THE SOUTH OF FRANCE!! Warm weather, amazing wine, spectacular cheese, lavender, honey, the French vacation plan. We would be living outside of Toulouse – the third largest city in France. It sits at the foot of the Pyrenees Mountains, is an hour from the coast, has one of the 10 best Saturday markets in Europe (so says the interwebs), and has more sunshine in 6 weeks of summer than Seattle has all year. We are so freaking doing this!

There is some red tape that we have to cut through, namely a work permit. Since around 27% of the French population under 30 is out of work, getting a permit right now, even in the aerospace field, is tres difficile. Fingers crossed. If this happens, then The Nana will move into La Maison du Talley, pay the utilities, and keep the zombie horde away. Visualize a sweet grandmother rocking away on the front porch with a shotgun across her lap. Add a Marlboro hanging from the corner of her mouth and you will have an accurate picture of The Nana.

I will miss my shop and my yard for those two years, but I will plug the hole in my heart with Cote du Rhone, Comte, a day trip or 6 to the Mediterranean coast, weekends in Paris/Rome, sunshine, and a yearly vacation to Morocco. I will be taking a chest of hand tools and am planning on making some small detailed pieces while there. I also plan on scouring the flea markets over that two year period for planes, chisels, and joinery tools.

Stamps-With-Foot is not concerned about logistics or housing or much of anything other than “How is Brodie going to handle that long flight?!” She feels that we will be taking Brodie back to ancestral homeland and has spent some amount of time talking to the dog about this possibility – trying to get him psyched about the proposition…

Delivery of all our worldly goods

/ Matt Talley

It has been an exercise in patience and frustration. 99% of our worldly positions were shipped from Hamburg to Seattle via an ocean container ship. We went with a medium priced international moving company, Hasenkamp, that seemed to be professional enough, but appearances can be deceiving. On moving day, it was discovered that the moving company didn’t reserve a space for the container truck in front of our building on a very narrow, crowded, one-way cobblestone street. Parking reservation is the norm when moving apartments in Germany. We requested one when we first contacted the relocation company, so we figured it was their issue. The guys sent to pack were pissed at their office when they showed up and blamed the lady organizing everything from the comfort of her chair, saying that it had happened before… and for us not to worry, as they would work it out with the office. They called someone and swapped out for a smaller truck.

The movers were very meticulous in packing our stuff and overall we though they did a great job. We bought them lunch and drinks and stayed out of the way to let them just do their job. Fast forward 9-weeks and we get a demand for payment form the moving company, Hasenkamp, for $600 extra bucks ?!!??? This was after we had already paid them $6,500. The added bill was to pay for the labor hours for moving our goods from the small truck to the ocean freight container since without a reserved space the container truck couldn’t park on our street. The packers called the Hasenkamp office, not me, and told them to bring a smaller truck brought over. I thought it was no big deal and explained it all to the guy requesting funds, expecting an ’Oops, our bad!” sort of reply. Nope, what I got was a shit-storm of e-mail demanding the additional money and explanations defying all logic, arguing over how it was really our fault that the international logistics and moving company hadn’t reserved a parking spot after we contracted them to conduct a door to door move. Included in this correspondence were not-so-veiled threats about holding our goods until we paid, incurring $100 a day in additional costs. The whole time this was going on, Hasenkamp refused to give us the status and location of our property. It wasn’t until the very end of this terse correspondence that we discovered that our stuff had been in the US for weeks, had already cleared US Customs, and was about to start incurring storage fees at the port. It the end I had to pay ½ of their original requested amount, but MAN it pissed me off to do so!

The condition of our stuff was 95% perfect. Lots of padding and tape and cardboard. There were a couple of chipped glasses, two broken picture frames, odd scratches here and there, and the right arm of our couch got smashed/crushed in the container somehow. I took some pictures and turned it in on the insurance. (Five weeks later – no response from Hasenkamp. Fuck ‘em. I am turning it over to my insurer and will give them the Hasenkamp info. AllState will cut me a check and send Hasenkamp a nasty legal note demanding the funds for reimbursement. This is why one should have insurance – companies have entire legal departments to deal with these type of issues.)

I will link the whole demand for payment e-mail chain here. I will leave the company e-mail addresses intact on the mails, for general information purposes only, of course. It would be sad indeed if some automated web crawler spotted them and auto generated a mountain of SPAM/p0rn mail to those addresses… Hopefully I get a few web hits from someone searching for company information or from someone who is thinking about using Hasenkamp to move with. Additionally, I am going on a few of the expat forums in Europe and post all this again.

Make a customer happy and he MIGHT tell two people, piss a customer off and he WILL tell twenty…