Red carpets
I was lucky enough to move to France with my job, which mean that the company paid for & organised the move. This was a good thing, not only because I didn't have to pay the big bill, but also because I had a 4 month old child at the time, so could do without the extra stress.

It was a 'full service' move, meaning the company came and packed everything up rather than me having to do it. And they were very zealous - they wrapped & packed a load of empty bottles I had meant to take to the bottle bank, and also a couple of wastepaper bins, complete with contents. It's lucky my young child was out of the house as I'm sure they would have packed him up otherwise.

The moving company insisted on an English foreman travelling with the van to work with the local team of French unpackers. Sounds like a nice idea, but the foreman didn't speak a word of French so it was my wife and I who had to explain everything to the French guys, including getting them to stop smoking and get back to work, and also to work an extra 30 minutes at the end of the day to finish off rather than have to come back the next day. We'd only been in the house for about 30 minutes before we moved in, so when the movers asked me which bedroom a piece of furniture should go in I answered confidently 'the one with the red carpets', only to have the guy come back 5 minutes later to tell me that the entire upstairs of the house had red carpets...

Suspiciously the only items we couldn't find after the move were two pairs of kitchen scissors which had probably been used by the movers. And every single item had a bright yellow sticker on it, which could only be removed using a solvent. This wasn't so bad when it was on the back of the object, but on the front of the fridge, on the front of a stereo, on the frame of a bed...
(Smale is stuffed, Wed 7 Jan 2015, 16:15, 2 replies)

Sounds like you forgot to put your bins out.

( monster munch person, man, woman... camera... TV?, Wed 7 Jan 2015, 19:38, closed)

and the movers forgot to stay about from them
(Carpe Cyprinidae, Wed 7 Jan 2015, 22:00, closed)