The Waley written flat lands in your inbox the same business hour, no exception, and the figure on it is the figure on your final invoice. Trish takes four basics over the phone — the leaving address, the destination address, the inventory headline and the date window — and tells you on the call whether your block on May 1 or October 1 is going to need the parking permit pulled and the freight elevator locked seventy-two hours out, or whether your November Tuesday is a clean dispatch slot we can fill on three days notice.
Eddy Ramirez does the walkthrough next. For inside-Chicago jobs he comes to your unit; for out-of-state and tight-calendar work he does a phone-camera tour and asks the same questions a stairway and an alley would. He writes the figure in English or Spanish, depending on what you grew up speaking, and the figure he writes does not change between the email and the move-morning. A $215 deposit holds your date on the dispatch board. Local in-town work bills at $185 an hour for a two-mover crew with a 26-foot truck, small studio and one-bedroom walk-ups land on flat figures from $545, binding interstate long-distance starts at $2,990 and is locked the day you sign, piano and specialty work starts at $455, labor-only loading hands run $115 an hour, and short-term Milwaukee Avenue indoor heated bay storage runs $135 to $305 a month depending on cubic feet.
If the scope on move-day genuinely grew — another bedroom of boxes, a piano that was not on the inventory, a second stop the buyer asked you to add — the crew chief on the truck tells you before the work starts and you sign off in writing before the meter changes. That is the only way the binding figure moves. Everything else is on us.
Pull the Waley written flat now. The walkthrough turns around in the same business day on most weeks, faster the closer we are to the May 1 or October 1 push, and the figure that lands in your inbox is the figure Marcus Waley signed before it left the Milwaukee Avenue desk.