Disorganised and Denied Responsibility
TLDR: Ultimately, this company advised the wrong size storage unit, confirmed the wrong size unit when questioned and reasonably could see our belongings would not fit, necessitated a second move of our belongings which they refused to pay for, and cost us additional money to what was originally agreed. We will be using them to store our belongings until we can retrieve them as we don't have another choice, but I absolutely would not recommend this company to anyone.
We organised storage including the removal service advertised with Brant and just about everything that could go wrong, did.
We contacted Brant to organise storage for our 2 bedroom house (although they will tell you we said flat) and they advised an 80 square foot container. They would later stand by this recommendation, stating that a flat would reasonably fit, even though it would consist of the same number of rooms and furniture as a 2 bedroom house, so size difference would be minimal.
When we first booked our storage we never received confirmation. So we called back up and confirmed that the booking had been made and was ready. The morning our storage was due to commence we called again first thing and discovered that our booking had not been processed properly, and the removals team had not been organised.
Brant did accept full responsibility for this mistake, and organised a removal team for late in the morning the same day, which we are grateful for. However, we were not given any information regarding what items would need to be moved to the front of the property for the movers which caused some annoyance when they arrived.
We had advised brant we were moving out and needed to store the contents of our entire 2 bedroom house. We were advised that the 80 square foot container would be big enough, and that the 1x 5t lorry load that was included would be about the same size as the unit so would fit the majority. While the movers were at our property it quickly became apparent a large amount would not fit on the lorry, and as such we questioned whether we would fit everything within the unit. We were assured it would.
If we had been told at this point that the unit would not be big enough, by the movers who were fully aware how much we had remaining to be stored and definitely should have known if there would be enough space. We would have arranged for a bigger unit, and for our 1 included trip to go directly to the bigger unit.
We questioned the size of the storage unit again while our items were being unloaded, and we were again reassured this would be big enough. While we left to collect more items, the removals team finished and left, without any further communication to us. I find it extremely rude they left without telling us they were done, and that they didn't think it was worth mentioning that we had a very small amount of space left after they finished unloading.
When we returned to our unit with some of our remaining items it was immediately obvious we would not be able to fit the rest of our belongings. We contacted brant and after a lot of back and forth we were able to arrange for a larger unit, and get the removals team back 2 days later to move our belongings to the new larger unit as we would not have been able to move the large furniture and appliances on our own. We also arranged to have access to the larger unit while waiting for the movers to come back as we needed to store our belongings so we could move out of our house.
We now have a 160 square foot storage unit, which our belongings only just fit into. So the notion that an 80 square foot unit would have been big enough after seeing the amount of belongings is ridiculous.
Brant have continuously argued that the fee for the additional movers trip should be our responsibility, even though it was only required due to the incorrect information provided to us by themselves and the movers they hired, which were representing their company. They did agree to pay half of this as a "goodwill gesture", which we argued as this cost clearly was their responsibility.
After a lot of going back and forth, instead of agreeing to pay the cost for the additional movers, they agreed not to charge us the additional fee for the larger storage container for the first 4 weeks. We agreed to this purely because we didn't want to argue with a company who wouldn't listen to reason while trying to move.