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Hartford Courant
Start Planning Early for Moving Day
Making a Move? How to Balance The Details Without Breaking Your Back Or Your Budget
By Liz Michalski
Sunday, May 10, 2003

If it all sounds overwhelming, help is available -- for a price. Moving consultant Sonya Weisshappel is a veteran of multiple moves and her New York-based company, Seriatim, Inc., will handle everything from packing up your boxes to figuring out where the furniture will go in your new house.

Clients can hand her the keys to their new residence and go on vacation. When they return two weeks later they’ll find their beds not only unpacked but made, with their clothes put away in the closet and their art hung on the wall, she said.

Weisshappel, who often works with international clients, will also make sure the utilities are turned on, the phone lines connected and favorite furniture fits into the right spaces, she said.

Weisshappel -- who primarily works in New York, New Jersey, Connecticut, as well as Los Angeles and London -- charges $15,000 for a full-service move for a family of four. She also offers individual components -- from packing up and dropping off items to be donated before a move to overseeing the move itself, allowing the homeowner to stay at work -- starting at $350.

To make moving go smoothly, Weisshappel recommends not only labeling each box but creating an inventory of the contents. She uses a checklist to keep track of each box during loading and unloading. She also takes photos of anything a client decides to put in storage. Not only does this remind clients of what they’ve stored, but it also helps during insurance claims of an item is damaged, she says.

Weisshappel can, in a pinch, plan and execute an entire move in a week, provided the clients have been in their resident for less than five years, she said. The longer a family has lived in a house the more belongings they’ve accumlated, the more time the move requires, she said. She’s moved everything from the contents of a living-room-sized closet to 500 turtles, she said.

Her largest job to date was for a high-level financial executive who was moving into Connecticut from Asia, and was consolidating belongings from a vacation home in the South. The move which involved 90,000 pounds of household goods cost about $80,000 for her services and those of her movers, she said.

"It took 14 days just to unload the trucks," she said.