Some of the worst jobs I have ever done were jobs where we were called out to clean up another moving company’s mess.
We’ve shown up to countless homes where the safe was on its back, side, or even had its face damaged from the impact. We’ve shown up to find safes wedged in between the steps and ceiling where we had to cut it out before moving it the rest of the way down. We’ve even shown up to a 1700-plus pound safe on its back halfway down a hill covered by a tarp because the moving company lost control of it.
Bottom line: moving safes and vaults requires the right equipment, knowledge, and precision. Lacking any of these components can lead to serious injury, damage to your safe or property, or worse.
Run For The Hills!
If you reach out to a moving company and they say something like, “sure we’ll send four or five guys out”, run – don’t walk – to another solution. If they can’t do the job with two guys, they shouldn’t be doing it at all. Real safe and vault moving is a very specialized skill that is developed over time.
You wouldn’t hire an amateur to come out and work on your plumbing or electrical, would you?
What It Takes to Move a Safe
Specialized Equipment: You can only push and pull your way so far. Professional safe movers are going to be equipped with heavy duty stair-climbing dollies to start. Here at Nick of Time Moving, we use a stairclimbing dolly that’s been beefed up even more than the traditional units, giving us the ability to handle weights well over 1500lbs on stairs that can handle that. This is in addition to common tools like pallet jacks and vacuum cups for gripping the safe.
Protective Materials: To mitigate damage to the home as well as the gun safe, a variety of materials need to be used. We use a combination of soft moving blankets and carpet runners, along with totally unique products that we have designed in house over the course of years of installations. These products have a high impact-resistance, super low friction coefficient, and tremendous weight-distributing properties.
Knowledge and Training: All the specialized equipment and protective materials in the world are worthless without the knowledge of exactly how to use them. That’s exactly why we at Nick of Time Moving developed our intensive training program, hosted at what we call the Training Fortress. Located on-site in our warehouse, The Fortress contains a first floor entrance and exit as well as a second floor accessible by a traditional straight staircase on one side and a staircase with a 90 degree turn on the other. We learned that we could condense 6 or more months of training in the field by training for just one week on the Training Fortress where we lay a thick foundation of mechanical principles tied with our moving philosophies.
If you need your gun safe or vault moved, do yourself a favor hire real professionals who specialize in safe moving. You want your movers to do this type of work all day, every day; not just from time to time. Save yourself the hassle and headache that come from hiring just any moving company to move your gun safe. It’ll save you money in the long run.