In April this year (2011) Kate and I moved our residence from Calgary, Canada, to Cellardyke, Scotland. Our budget for the move was limited, and, although we decided not to move any big pieces of furniture, we have quite a big collection of books. Moving is something that we dreaded since we knew we had to do it in January. So… how do you go about it?

Well, we started by looking on-line for moving companies. This is one of those sectors on the internet where most of what you find is aggregated sites that ask you to fill forms, and supposedly, they will send your way a number of quotes. Generally useless because most of the time you get nothing back, but sometimes even dangerous, because we got at least one quote (from Euro Transport International) that we later found by doing a quick search on-line was basically a scam (check this out for scary stories on how a move can become a nightmare).

Finally, we thought that it would be a lot safer to go local, and it paid off. Before anyone says anything, this post is just the result of grateful clients to a wonderfully executed service, and we have absolutely no conflict of interest here. The service from Highland Movers which operate as STARLINE OVERSEAS MOVING for international relocations was wonderful, friendly, courteous, timely, and dead-on on the estimation. We chose to do groupage to make it cheaper, but it still took shorter than expected. Every box arrived in perfect state, dry, and the movers back here were also friendly and very quick. In other words, if you are in western Canada, and need to move abroad, you should call these guys. Thanks Robin!!

So you have an idea, we moved about 195 cubic feet (equivalent to approx 80 banker’s boxes), and before insurance, the total price came below 4000 $CAN. It took about two months to arrive, and it could have been less if the local movers had trusted Kate that “a 40 foot truck will not fit through our narrow street”. After the initial payment there came no extra charges, not even from customs (at least so far).

Anyways, I thought I would put this out in the interwebs: if you are moving, please, check your mover with the BBB, do not trust anyone that does not want to do a visual inspection of your stuff, and choose local if you can. Also, if they are not very responsive on e-mail through the whole process, that’s probably a bad sign (I count at least 20 e-mails sent by our moving manager in the last few months).