Watch out, people! Heather of Good Riddance promised me a decluttering and downsizing job for my…read morecondo, but left after a one-minute conference with her workers. Four different people worked for two days in 2 teams. They merely took everything off shelves and the floor and taped them up randomly in large, too-heavy boxes, poorly and incompletely labelled, with odd mixes of contents.
They left the awkward "clutter" behind -- things (like timber and other rubbish) that they could easily have taken away. Without a word to me, they packed away all my paint (even dead cans ten years old) and brushes. Y All my tools were packed, leaving me not a single screwdriver (or an Allen key to take apart my bed when the time came).
All this occurred with hardly a word to me about how they were going to proceed. (I stayed home the whole two days.)
Heather promised a small discount if I sent the $800 deposit to her as cash. This, I think, is a way of ensuring I can't get any of it back as I might have, had I paid with a credit card.
My partner, at 80 years old and I, at 74, then spent five exhausting days cutting open 40 heavy boxes, sorting through them for things to donate, things to put in storage, and to leave a minimum for daily use (they packed all my tools, my placemats, napkins, kitchen implements ... I couldn't find anything!), and then getting rid of the recycling and donatables.
The contents of many boxes had to be separated into two because they were too heavy for us to lift. Eight heavy cardboard boxes of "tools" (including five toolboxes, hand tools, electrical tools, broken tools, junk, and jars of rusted nails and screws) we managed to reduce to less than one box. The rest was donated or thrown out. Why were WE doing that work later, I ask?
After their two days, the job wasn't close to being done. After a week of our backbreaking work, we are nearly there. But this has strained us hugely, both physically and emotionally, and resulted in my partner being practically bedridden now.
They didn't even take anything to my storage locker, as promised.
All Heather could offer when she came the next day (to collect the unused boxes) was that she thought we weren't a "good fit" for her business! She refused to listen to our feedback.
For all their years of experience (and at $75 per hour for each of the four workers), I expected a whole lot more. I'm the customer and only wanted to get decluttered and organized for a potential move in some months' time. What I got was an apartment full of boxes with Christmas stuff mixed in with CD's, a broken partner, and no coaching or consultation from Heather or the inexperienced, uncommunicative workers.
One of Heather's great ideas, a new "pantry" in the store room, was not even communicated to the workers. We had to set it up ourselves after they left.
The workers left several aspects of the job unfinished, including not emptying bottom kitchen cupboards and a deep closet, which we found hard to access with our arthritic knees. There was no explanation for the unfinished work. Some aspects were simply abandoned.
So much for the "creative and innovative organizing solutions to meet [the customer's] needs."
Heather did a terrible job of managing her workers and myself. She never visited or inspected their work. Apparently, the first team did not communicate with the second one. Or with Heather. Then, to add insult to injury, she blamed me for the resulting chaos.
I'm not the expert. That's what I expected to pay professionals for -- to do their job.
