Deland Moving & Storage, Inc.

My father-​in-​law gave my wife and I furniture he had in Deland’s storage as part of his wedding gift. This had to be a good help to settle in our new house.
First of all, our new house is actually entirely renovated. We just moved in after they finished renovations, with nice new walls and wooden floors, entirely clean. For more cleanliness we even paid an extra cleaning from the landlord.
The movers came with my father-in-law’s furniture. They began to move everything to the house with not much care. As a result, our new and just painted walls are now decorated with scratches and black prints of dirty hands. Our new wooden floors are full of scratches and we’ll need to request a new cleaning and probably polish the floors. One of the scratches is a serious one. The landlord was present when all this happened.
One of the parts of the closet came with what looks as a well developed humidity. The furniture had been 5 years in storage.
The central piece of furniture is a big glass and aluminum table. The movers had no idea of how to mount it. They did it wrong and they damaged the central piece. Plus, they forgot the glass part.
When the movers came back to put the glass piece on the dining table 2 days later, the driver-​boss came with new personnel. One of them was a professional «arguer.» Because we had complained, they were very aggressive, and they began telling me that they didn’t believe a word of our complaints. This is not a good way to start a conversation. They claimed that the damages to the walls and floors cannot be proven that are theirs. They claimed that the well developed humidity in that part of the closet was actually carpenter’s glue or similar. Of course, before taking the picture as proof the «arguer» carefully removed the fungus. I got a picture of him while removing it.
As for the table, they realized they didn’t mount it correctly. They had to take the entire table – with the glass they were delivering to us – to have it mounted at their offices, because they have no idea of how to mount the table.
Overall, these movers have no idea of how to do their job and be professional with customers. We were polite, helpful, and welcoming, we offer them everything we had on the fridge to drink, and we tipped them generously. The driver-​boss was another story. The way I was treated was extremely rude and aggressive, to the point to start a quarrel. You can’t treat clients as trash and accuse him to be liars when they have complained about some issue with the job. It’s a hard job, but it’s part of the job. I never experienced something similar with movers before.

Initially I was very pleased with Deland and blamed myself for not being sufficiently organized. They packed my stuff on one day and then packed the truck with my stuff and delivered it all in the same (very long) day. They stacked boxes in my new place.
Here’s what I discovered as I attacked the boxes: heavy boxes were on top of light boxes causing the boxes to lose integrity and start crushing; boxes were very poorly labeled, and typically only on the tape used on the top of the box, so it was impossible to find things without going through all the boxes — for example, it took me a month to find my router and VOIP box in order to restore service; as the day progressed and they started getting tired, they stopped wrapping glass in paper and I found a number of items destroyed from the lack of attention; I had cash from CraigsList sales (about $ 1,000) in a desktop organizer which they packed before I got to take the cash out — there was no cash left when I unpacked.
I contacted Deland to discuss this, and started off by saying this was a very difficult call for me to make. Instead of providing customer service, he got very defensive and told me I’d have to pay for polygraph tests for all his men. He finally promised to investigate and call back but I didn’t hear from him for the next 3 weeks until I called him again.
If I felt like my business was valuable, if I was treated with respect when I called to advise Deland of the missing cash and if I hadn’t seen the poor work quality exhibited as they worked too much in a single day — my review would be very different.
Should you still chose to use them, DON’T let them pack your house and unpack in your new location in the same day!!!