DC Van Lines Moving & Storage Company

I’ve used DC Vanlines 4 times and have been quite happy each time.
The first was an emergency move when a residence was no longer safe. I called and they moved the apartment the next day. The second was to move about half a truck of furniture from Gburg to Virginia. Arrived on time and had no problem using the 30 minutes moving furniture around after delivering it. The third was when we were cleaning a place and needed to move really heavy living room furniture up a flight of stairs. 40 minutes after calling, 2 strong men arrived and completed the move. The fourth was moving from a townhouse to an apartment. Same flexibility with scheduling. Same accurate arrival and departure within the estimated time.
The person answering the phone guides you thru estimating, accurately gives estimates that have never been exceeded.

DC Van Lines did a bad job with our move.
They sent a team of three guys, described as one of their very best crews. They were nice and seemed to be moving quickly. They were packing our entire apartment and did a nice job — each plate and glass was individually wrapped in newspaper.
Everything seemed to be moving quickly, until all of a sudden they just didn’t come back, and an hour later, we went down to the loading dock and saw that they had been hanging out, hiding and smoking behind the van, for over an hour. Since we were paying them by the hour, and they didn’t seem to be eating lunch or anything, it was irritating, but fine.
Then, when they arrived at our new place, they refused to park in the spot we had gotten a $ 60 permit for and taped up signs to reserve, and instead parked somewhere that caused them to be ticketed, and they promptly handed us the $ 30 ticket to pay.
Then they proceeded to knock our furniture against the walls on its way in needlessly, like really sloppy work. At some point, one of the movers took a cell phone call in the middle of putting a piece of furniture down, which caused him to drop it on our parquet floor, leaving a big gash.
Then, after we told them a cabinet we had was delicate, they proceeded to lift it in a way that put a lot of strain on the fragile side, and the cabinet door came open and broke right off.
Moving day was bad, but the attitude of the central office was by far the worst aspect of working with them. We gave the movers our credit card number after the move was complete and assumed that they used it to pay the bill. Several days later, they called us repeatedly threatening a collection agency on us, since we had not paid — this despite that they had made no extra attempts to get us to pay. They assured us they would pay for the repair of our furniture, and I sent them an invoice from a furniture repair place for putting the door back on, but they insisted on us paying the bill for the move first. The moment we paid the bill for the move, they stopped responding to us about paying for the damage, and we have not been able to get a hold of them since, despite repeated attempts.
This company is what has given moving companies a bad name, and I recommend you steer clear of them, especially since there seem to be some good new companies out there.