Moving On from the Swiss Experience

We’d like to know the origin and destination of your move, and most importantly the reason of your move. How did you experience that?

I moved from Switzerland, Basel to France, Lille because of personal and working reasons. I decided to move in with my partner and had the luck to find a new job, so the stars were telling me to move on from my Swiss experience. The overall moving experience was a bit tiresome, because of the sheer amount of things to think about and because of the bureaucracy (it’s never funny when there’s customs in the middle). Thankfully, I’m a very organized person and the help I could find online, along with the support from the moving company, hugely alleviated the tension and stress.

Choosing a good moving company is painful, we know that. How did you manage to find the perfect one among the thousands of existing ones?

First things that I checked what was my budget for the move. I only had to move a few electronics plus less than 15 moving boxes, I didn’t need any extra service, like disassembling/reassembling of furniture, in-depth cleaning and such so I was expecting quotes on the average/low side of the budget (less than 2000€/CHF).
Then, of all the quotes received that fit into the budget, I compared the online reputation of their company, focusing especially on the reviews on sites like Google, TrustPilot and Sirelo. I was not interested about the high/low stars outliers, but on the 3/4 stars reviews. Based on those criteria I made the final decision.

Take us through the moving day – did everything go as planned?

Moving day was easy: I had everything packed as planned and the moving company arrived right on time. They took charge of my boxes and becoming with the utmost care and within 30 minutes my apartment was completely empty.
I just recycled the last few items, greeted a few friends and ate the list slice of Vito’s pizza while I was waiting for the renting agency’s clerk to take the final tour of the apartment for the key handover. Once I was done with that (45 minutes), I went to the station, had a beer and waited for the train to come and pick me up to my next stop of my life!

 What are 3 tips that you think could help others make their moving day less chaotic?

I am a pretty methodical person and that’s not my first international moving, so I knew beforehand that a special care was needed.
My top 3 tips would be:

• Prepare in advance. Do your research online about the bureaucracy required to move from A to B, considering both points of view (in my case, I realized that there was a huge difference of details needed by the Swiss and the French customs, depending on the country you’re leaving/entering)
• Don’t procrastinate, unless you can afford the extra cost in terms of money and stress deriving from that
• Don’t reinvent the wheel, use the knowledge already available, especially online. You’re not the first one to move from A to B, probably.