My mother-in-law has recently moved from south-east Queensland to us here in Devonport – a move my wife and I ourselves made nearly four months ago. Until she buys her own place, she has moved in with us. Hence, her house contents have been placed in storage until an address is known.
Grace takes a standard two weeks to move goods from SEQ to a Tasmanian address. In mum-in-law’s case, Grace advised that they would provide four weeks storage free of charge: Grace have now sent her an invoice for a period beyond this initial four weeks.
Interestingly, we now find out that Grace counts the four weeks as commencing on the day after pick up. Not surprisingly, she has complained, on the grounds that the goods cannot be in “storage” at the same time as they are spending two weeks in transit: “storage” logically commences after “transit”. The relevant part of Grace’s email reply is:
“As our policy is a transit warranty cover, our company policy is for the storage to start from date after uplift, which is why the free period starts from this date.”
We don’t understand what this means – presumably a reference to the insurance that M-I-L took out with Grace, to cover the goods both in transit and in storage.
So, OK, “company policy”. Has anyone in the Community had a similar experience or know of any industry standard in a case such as this?
Like yourself I would expect (rightly or wrongly) an offer of free storage would commence when the goods were at their closest available warehouse to the delivery destination.
In the absence of seeing the contract or any verbal agreements made or assumed, it would be plausible for them to store the goods in Qld prior to shipping if their BNE warehouse was empty and the TAS one full, or anywhere in-between. It would obviously affect delivery time to the destination address, but.
The point is there are variables and ways to view them. The gold standard is reviewing the contract to see if it addresses when ‘free’ storage begins or if the start date is left as an ‘undefined’ time.
Storage of goods by a removalist will be subject to the terms and conditions of the contract associated with the move. It is worth reading these terms and conditions to what they say about when ‘storage’ or services starts. This will guide you to when the storage started and the advice you have received from Grace.
It is possible that storage commences from the date of pick-up to cover all eventualities associated with a move. I say this as in some cases, placing moved items in temporary storage would occur on the day of pick-up. A example would be a local move where the new premises aren’t available for delivery of the moved goods or the moved items aren’t been shipped directly from the place of pickup (the later happened in our own move to Tassie - our containers were stored temporarily in Brisbane until the train to Melbourne departed a few days later). Removalists would have standard contracts which cover all eventualities rather than individual contracts which are specific to each and every need. Doing the later would become an administering nightmare for the removalist.
The storage item may be a container, or a part of the storage facility set aside for short term holding of goods expected to be moved soon, in which the items were packed into at the premises or on delivery to the local depot, this could occur within a day. This would somewhat explain “a transit warranty cover”. The goods are not in long term storage but rather are in transit storage (expected shorter term storage) as goods are expected to be moved to a new permanent location in a reasonably short period. This containerised storage has occurred on several moves we have made.
