Parade season is upon us, Utah.  The 2011 Utah Valley Parade of Homes begins on June 3 this year and continues (through numerous counties) until the beginning of September.  If you are a builder or designer that has been involved in the parade in previous years, you know that it can be stressful trying to get everything done from the landscaping to the art hanging.

This year, why not make one part a little easier on yourself?  Wasatch Transfer is more than just a moving company.  We have done numerous installation jobs for designers in the Salt Lake City and Park City areas and are very experienced with Parade of Homes installations.  We have had to work around ongoing construction, landscaping, and finishing and while that is not an ideal situation, we understand that deadlines don’t always permit ideal conditions.  We understand our part of the job and will do our best to accommodate you and your deadlines in prompt and professional manner.

Our employees are experienced with every aspect of the furniture and accessory install and will take the utmost care with everything from maneuvering the heaviest cabinet safely into place or hanging the most delicate of your artwork.

If you are like me, you probably don’t always think about it when something is working how it is supposed to but the second it isn’t performing up to par you start questioning how reliable it really is.  Whether it is an actual product like your car or your toaster or a service such as your lawn care or your moving and storage company (If you live in the Salt Lake or Park City areas that last one should be us by the way!).  When things are going smoothly, we can direct our effort to what is important to us and let the product or service we paid for perform the task it is meant to.  When things aren’t going smoothly we have to direct our efforts to problem solving.

There are always going to be bumps in the road but that is where being reliable comes into play.  The more reliable a product or service, the fewer bumps, which means more time for us to concentrate on what is important.  We pride ourselves on consistently performing our jobs to our customers’ satisfaction and being a reliable moving company and storage facility in the Salt Lake City area.

One of the companies that provide us a number of services such as helping us with our social media marketing in exchange for our honest opinion about them (like the one I am about to give) is Qwest.   The one service of thiers that we use everyday and never have to give a second thought to is our Qwest business internet service.  Much like everyone else, we use our internet constantly for a wide range of applications from the less important (streaming music in our warehouse) to the mandatory for our business to run (contacting clients, managing inventories, etc.).  We need reliability and Qwest delivers.

Here at Wasatch Transfer we know that moving can be a stressful event for adults as well as young children. It can be especially rough on a child who has spent his or her young life in the same home and/or neighborhood. Because of this, we’ve decided to share a few quick tip we’ve learned over the years as Salt Lake City movers.

Answer Questions – Children are always full of questions. When you decide you are ready to move your family be sure to sit down with your kids to answer questions and address any concerns they may have.

Children’s Moving Books – These can be helpful preparing your kids for the move as well as make them more comfortable with it. Check out books like “The Moving Book: A Kid’s Survival Guide” or “The Berenstain Bears’ Moving Day.”

Involve Children – Make your kids feel like they are an important part of your family’s moving team. Encourage them to pack a little suitcase or backpack of the things that are most important to them so that they have access to them during the move. Allow your children to pick their own rooms at the new home if possible.

Lead By Example – Children can tell when their parents are stressed out. Try to make moving fun for you and your kids. If you are calm, collected, and maintain a positive attitude they won’t feel like moving is such a bad thing.

At Wasatch Transfer Moving & Storage, we pride ourselves on being professional movers and much more.  One of the many “extras” we provide is professional art installation.

We work with a number of interior designers in the Salt Lake City and Park City areas whose needs range from furniture installation and placement to a variety of detail oriented skills including art hanging.  In doing so, our employees get a lot of experience in a number of situations so they are comfortable and confident with even the most complex art hanging jobs.  Hanging a large item or heavy mirror in a stairwell or hanging a multi-picture collage can be a difficult task for someone that isn’t used to it but there aren’t many situations that we haven’t seen before.

Weather you are a designer with a house full of art to hang or you’ve just purchased the perfect piece to hang at the top of your stairwell, give us a call and let us make installation easy for you!

At Wasatch Transfer we have always counted on word of mouth as one of our main sources of advertising.  Now, with the help of Qwest’s Social Media Launchpad, we are taking word of mouth to the next level with social media marketing.  Our hope is to have a place for future customers to get some information about who we are as a company as well as what we do.  We also want a place for our current and past customers to share their thoughts and experiences with our company as well as an easy way to pass it all on to their friends, co-workers, and families.  So whether you are just hearing about us or have been with us for a while, please feel free to add some comments, follow us on Twitter, and “like” us on Facebook.

Thanks to Qwest for not only offering this new service to us, but most amazingly, thanks for offering it and including it in the services we already had.  The Launchpad team has done an amazing job of getting us set up with our blog and linking all of our new social media accounts.  They have also been great at keeping things running smoothly and helping us get going with our side of it.  It isn’t often that a company gives you so much extra for the price you are already paying.

We have been working as movers in the Park City and Salt Lake City areas for over 10 years now and we have seen just about everything.  As movers, we have seen people that are well prepared and organized and we have also seen quite the opposite.  One of the biggest factors to being prepared on moving day is to start planning early and get as much of the small stuff out of the way as possible.  This creates a much less stressful situation for you, the customer.

A couple things you can do weeks in advance -

1. Fill out your change of address form – it usually takes a week or two to process so the sooner you get it done the less interruption you will have with your postal service
2. Schedule your cable / satellite appointment – sure, you will have plenty of unpacking to do when you get to the new home but you are going to need to take a break now and then; besides, your provider may not have an appointment available if you wait until the last minute

These tips don’t have anything to do with your actual moving day but I assure you, the more of this type of stuff that you have done, the easier moving day will be.

One of our long term storage vaults being loaded

Wasatch Transfer started out, as mentioned previously, as a Park City moving company.  As our customer base grew over the years, so did their needs.  We not only started expanding our relocation services to the Salt Lake City and surrounding areas, we started offering new services.
We ran into a lot of customers that for one reason or another needed to store items for short or for long term.  They had sold their home but their new home wouldn’t be available for a couple of weeks. Sometimes renovations created the need to empty parts of the house but not the entire home.  Other times people were relocating to the area and building a new home that wouldn’t be ready for months or even years and needed to keep their furniture with us while they rented a home until their new home was ready.  From these needs, we expanded from a moving company to moving and storage.

We have offered full service storage for years now.  We will come pick it up or you can have it dropped off to us depending on your situation.  Either way, we will inventory every item, protect every item, and carefully pack it away until you need it.  Unlike self-storage units, our warehouse is heated in the winter and your items can be in our control from start to finish which translates into less stress for you.

Along the same line as growing to fit your customer’s needs, Qwest small business service has evolved with our company to offer new services to keep us and companies like us content and competitive in todays market.  What started out as a phone line and internet service with them has grown over the years.  As phone books become less and less relevant in today’s world, Qwest has started to help us market our business online as well as a host of other services that we will get into in future posts.  All they ask in return is that we give our honest opinion of their services and help spread the word.

When people choose to pack on their own instead of having the moving company do it for them, most use common sense and label the box with a content description and the room the contents belong in.  This helps keep things organized when it is time to unload and it speeds up the process.  Todays tip takes labeling one step further.

Color code boxes according to how often you use the items and how soon you will actually need the contents of the box in your new home.  Use tape or sticky notes of different colors.  One for stuff you might need in the first day, a second for stuff you will need in the first week, a third for stuff that you probably won’t need for quite some time.  That way when the cable guy comes the next day and it comes time to pay him you don’t have to dig through every box labeled “office” to find you checkbook, you know it is in the “office” box with the green tape.

The other, and probably more beneficial result of prioritizing boxes is that it breaks up the monumental task of unpacking into smaller, more manageable blocks.  You don’t feel the urgency of getting everything unpacked in a day or even two because you know which boxes you can leave until the end.

One of the national hardware store chains has a TV ad campaign running right now that has caught my attention.  There are a number of versions of the commercial but they all have a running theme.  Some do-it-yourself home project goes horribly wrong and the unfortunate project doer ends up at the store buying the tool they should have been using all along.  The commercials all end with some version of the phrase reminding us that there is “a proper tool for every job.”

It is a simple idea that we have all probably learned on our own time and time again.  Trying to tighten the screw on our eyeglasses with a knife never quite gets it tight enough but if you find that ridiculously tiny screwdriver that you bought two years ago in the kitchen junk drawer it takes 2 seconds and your done. Using a paper clip to change a watch band on our own takes a half hour but the guy at the jewelry store can do it it 2 minutes with the proper tool.  You can chop a garlic bulb for 10 minutes to get the same result a garlic press gives you in seconds.

We count on a number of tools each day to help our jobs run smoothly from hand trucks and floor dollies to the furniture pads and tie down straps.  One of the many tools we rely on daily is Qwest’s business internet service.  Like a lot of companies I’m sure, we count on our internet for everything from scheduling employees, to inventory tracking, to communicating with customers.  With so many things are dependent on our internet service, speed and reliability are very important to us.  When we researched business internet providers, Qwest was the clear choice and our service has been nothing short of excellent from day one…it is the proper tool for the job.

I’m telling you all this because Qwest is helping me with my social media in exchange for my honest views on Qwest services. You can learn more at Qwest Small Business

If anyone has actually found this page for our first post, you may be wondering why a moving company would have a blog and what exactly we plan to blog about.  Let me answer both of those questions for you.

Whether you move every year or two or only once or twice in your lifetime, moving day is usually a big event.  There is always too much to do and never enough time to do it and as the big day gets closer the stress level usually rises.  It always seems like a manageable task when moving day is a month away but as the day nears there is always more to do than you ever expected.  This brings me to one of the topics that we will be posting about on a regular basis; moving tips.  Take some advice from professionals.  Whether you plan to do it on your own or hire a moving company (hopefully us) you will find a number of useful tips right here in the future.  We have been servicing the Salt Lake City and Park City communities for 10 years and counting now so we have seen just about everything and know the moving business inside and out.

As for the “Why?” we would blog, I asked myself the same thing and came up with a simple answer.  Our business has been built on and has thrived on word of mouth referrals and in this day and age, social media is the new “word of mouth”.  We hope to make this blog a place to connect with our customer base, spread the word about our moving and storage services, and give our customers and potential customers a closer look at Wasatch Transfer and what we are all about.