With our house secured and references all sorted out we now have a firm move date and are getting all the various wheels rolling. Fundamental number one - removals. Last time we had SBS move us from Sheffield to Bolton which was a godsend - they were very efficient indeed considering that we were (surprise) totally disorganised and only half-packed. This time we are going to learn from our mistakes and I've been stuffing boxes on a regular basis for the past few days so we have as little as possible to do on the last weekend.
Anyway we of course had to choose a firm to do our move and picked three out of the yellow pages to ask for quotes - Eckersleys, Cromptons and (for comparison) Pickfords. Eckersleys gave us a very rough quote over the phone and both Pickfords and Cromptons sent a man round to have a look at our stuff. We hang on for a few days waiting for the quotes to come back an lo and behold the one from Pickfords was almost exactly twice that of the other two - it's really amazing what they can get away with for the sake of a brand. If we had a house full of really expensive stuff I can see the benefit of it mind - with the big boys you know that their insurance is going to be real and valid and that if there is any trouble they have to listen to you - but then again we haven't got anything that is worth much and the little people I'm sure are less fussy (and likely to charge you through the nose) if anything goes wrong from our end, which it is not! All in all, Pollocks to Pickfords we are going to use Cromptons.
