spam...bannage

We "only" changed the hard date for the movers once, but changed the soft date twice. Seems like builders are all optimists. For some reason, they are eternally certain that all subcontractors will show up on time, do everything exactly the way they're supposed to, coordinate perfectly with other subs, and clean up after themselves -- even though they never have before!

Someone above mentioned delivery people making more than they do. FYI depending on the company and area of the country they work in some are making just above minimum wage or may even be repeat day laborers. Once I found this out from a friend whose son was doing this I started tipping. Some, the ones that seem really rushed are paid per delivery and not an hourly rate. Not all house movers are low paid. My husband knew a crew of ladies that packed up houses for moving. They were very, very well paid and apparently worth every penny. Of course if the delivery people do not do a good job that is one thing but if they do what is expected or more and they can accept a tip do so. Always consider things that are outside of their control such as the weather.

I thought I'd reply to my own thread here for anybody who wants to read it in the future. First, the movers were awful and had had five hours of sleep. Although they were mostly very nice, they got more and more sloppy as the ten-hour day wore on, and so only half of this is their fault personally. The moving company should not have sent two guys to empty 30k lbs of stuff from a moving truck when they had done the same thing for some other family 600 miles away the night before. We bought ramboard as well as ramboard tape. Per some YouTube video I watched, we put painters tape down on the floor and then taped the ramboard tape onto that instead of onto the floor directly. This was kind of a hassle, and I don't know if it was actually necessary, but it worked fine. The ramboard mostly stayed put. We created paths to the major areas of the house with that and I was glad we did. There was no floor damage. We also layered 2-3 folded moving blankets on the front step so protect the exterior tile. This was incredibly important, because they carelessly rammed the hand truck wheels into it every single time to get it up the front step. I couldn't believe how hard they hit it every time – it was loud even through the blankets! – and I was very glad we had the folded moving blankets there. I did have to reposition them several times throughout the day. I couldn't come up with a good solution in time for protecting the interior corners that didn't require installation and/or drilling something into the wall, so we just crossed our fingers. They rammed a hand truck into one corner and it took a 1x2" chunk out of the drywall, but everything else was good. We have an interior full-lite glass door in one room, and they almost shattered it by backing some furniture into it. It was only through luck that my husband was there to say "wait! stop!" and prevent a disaster. We also arranged the small amount of furniture already present to block access to areas that we cared about a lot. We moved living room furniture and boxes to prevent them getting anywhere near the TV, and we also blocked off the kitchen so they didn't have to navigate boxes and furniture around the island and the rest of the kitchen's many right angles. Looking back, my advice to myself would be to find 2-3 people who can just sit in the high-risk areas all day and keep an eye on things. The movers were definitely more careful when someone was sitting in an area, so if we'd had someone stationed by the tight areas, that probably would have helped. All in all we didn't have too much damage, though what we had was indeed annoying, and the ramboard was definitely 100% worth the cost and trouble to set up.