Moving | When you have to demolish walls or use a crane

The piano, the safe, the marble table… we forget how massive and heavy certain objects that are part of our daily life are. Until we have to move: then they become a real nightmare!

Karyne Duplessis Piche
special collaboration

These “XXL” objects give a hard time during the moving season and, above all, they are expensive to take with you.

Pierre-Olivier Cyr knows something about it. Moving stories, he has hundreds to tell. The young man has been running the Montreal family business Clan Panneton since 2015. From his first steps in the profession, at the age of 16, he quickly faced extraordinary objects.

His biggest challenge? Safes, which are quite common on the island of Montreal. “They sometimes weigh up to 1,200 pounds,” he says. This implies that we sometimes have to demolish walls to get them out or move them with a crane. »

Michel Jacques, owner of Déménagement DMAX Express, in Saint-Jérôme, often rubs shoulders with another juggernaut: pianos. The instrument can be found at a good price on classified ad sites, some give them away. It’s no coincidence, according to Mr. Jacques: the pianos are sometimes so heavy, so difficult to move that he often advises his clients to get rid of them rather than move them.

“When people realize the price involved, the risk for the integrity of the house and for the safety of men, I tell them that if they are not attached to it, they better take out the saw chain and cut it up,” says Mr. Jacques. It costs less and avoids a lot of problems. »

Marble furniture, such as a table, often paid for at a high price, also has great sentimental value. However, when the time comes to bring them to a new home, it is not uncommon for customers to have a bad surprise. Marble is not only heavy, it dries out and cracks over time. The object then becomes impossible to move.

Heavy duty fridges

The new appliances are more beautiful, more chic and more efficient, but they are not lighter. On the contrary. Movers frequently find, once they arrive on site, that the kitchen is equipped with a full-size refrigerator (like those from Sub-Zero). These new appliances, like gas stoves, are so heavy that additional employees often have to be called in.

The most recent television sets pose the opposite problem. They are much lighter than the old CRT screens, but they are so thin and so wide that the movers do not always dare to put them in their truck for fear of damaging them.

Prepare well

Moving companies observe that customers forget, or hide, non-standard furniture during quotation in the hope of reducing costs. However, these bulky objects often require a second truck. And when employees have to be called in at the last minute, customers sometimes find themselves paying the equivalent of two moves.

Bringing your spa falls into this category.

“It usually takes a second truck, explains Pierre-Olivier Cyr, of Clan Panneton. You have to lay him on his side and take several precautions. People don’t realize that even if you’re very careful, you often demolish the whole yard when you take it out. »

When moving, the plastic of the spa tends to crack, and the interior pipes of the device, to unscrew. This is why the specialist strongly recommends calling in a professional before putting the device back into operation.

Same advice for a pool table. His move always requires the services of a professional so that the slates remain intact.

Because even if the objects are well packed, the poor road conditions cause the truck to move often, exposing the objects in it to breakage.

Vibrations are bad for a lot of cheap furniture. It only takes a few stacked boxes and potholes for a table to fall apart during transport. Word of movers.

The collections

Collectibles are often a headache for moving companies. Whether it’s the rare bottles of wine that must be kept horizontal from the beginning to the end of the trip, or the room full of vinyl records whose sleeves must be placed in the same order once at their destination, movers in saw all the colors.

Pierre Cyr, former president of the Clan Panneton, was himself the owner of an extraordinary object: a cigar room. The piece was bulky, heavy, but the business manager refused to use a crane to bring it to his new home. Transporting this extraordinary object was a real obstacle course.

“It took eight hours to get to 18^e floor with a clearance of 5 cm in the fire escape, says his son Pierre-Olivier Cyr. All employees remember this. »

The cigar room arrived on the top floor of the building unscratched, but that’s not always the case. To avoid unpleasant surprises, moving companies advise taking dozens of photos of non-standard objects before D-Day and notifying your insurers.

But above all, they all recommend not waiting until the last minute to tell your mover that the sectional sofa in the living room is in fact as big as a row of cinemas!