I moved from Bremerton, WA to Arkansas. ABF was scheduled to drop the trailer on Monday, July 2. I got a call Friday afternoon asking if I wanted the trailer early. The trailer was dropped on Friday, June 29. I had loaders lined up for Monday but they were not available over the weekend. I asked the ABF driver if he had any recommendations for loaders and was given a card. I called Moving Made EZ and got a crew of 4. They worked very diligently and it appeared that they were loading it correctly. They finished loading the 28' trailer in just under 6 hours, tied in a spider web to hold the boxes, put the bulkhead in place and the loading ramp back in the trailer. Because of the July 4 holiday, the trailer was picked up on Thursday, July 5. It went to their Tacoma depot and left for Arkansas a couple of days later. I got a call the afternoon of July 9 that the trailer was in their Little Rock depot. I needed the trailer to be dropped at my location around 5:00 pm on a Friday because it is on a downtown street and I couldn't block parking during the week or day. The trailer was dropped at 5:15 pm on Friday and we got it unloaded by noon on Saturday. I called and they came and picked up the trailer at 10:00 am on Sunday. ABF is certainly the way to go if you need to move a lot of heavy stuff. You do have to pack everything yourself and that took me about 6 months working a few hours each day, but I spent less than $1,000 on boxes, bubble wrap, tape and wrapping paper. The moving company that I contacted wanted $50,000 to move my house. With ABF I paid $5,200 for the whole trailer. I did have to pay the loaders and the unloaders $2,000. So my total was under $8,500.
Now, for the loaders: as I said, they appeared to be loading the trailer correctly. When we opened the trailer and removed the bulkheads the bottom 2 rows of boxes were crushed. This continued throughout the load. I had all my heavy boxes (books, reams of paper, etc.) well marked and yet many of them were staked higher than the middle of the rows. There was a lot of collapsing of the rows of boxes each time we removed a layer. An antique wardrobe had one of its legs broken off by the box that was stacked on top of it. The glass on a very large painting was broken because the painting box was placed on the top of a stack and then a heavy box was stacked on top of it. I have not had the opportunity to open all of the crushed boxes because I have over 500 boxes and about 100 of them are damaged to some extent. Needless to say, I was not very happy with the loaders. I guess I should have been standing by the trailer as the boxes were going in watching where they were stacked. More spider web tie downs throughout the load would probably have prevented some of the collapsing rows of boxes.
Bottom line: ABF was very professional; everyone I dealt with was helpful and went out of their way to make sure I had all the information I needed. They made a very stressful evolution easy. read more