Welcome to Gulliver's Moving and Storage Company, Servicing DC, MD, and VA

What You Can Expect
uilliver's Movers offers quality service at a competitive price. From start-to-finish you and your items can expect to be treated with the respect you deserve. Our mission is to create customers for life, taking the best possible care of each of our customers, from the first phone call until after the last item has been delivered. With Gulliver's Movers, you can expect exceptional service every step of the way.
Pre Move: After you secure a move date with one of our Sales Consultants, we will work with you in selecting the appropriate types and amount of boxes and packing materials from Box Xpress, and aid your decision-making on valuation (transit protection) for your move. In addition, a variety of helpful resources, such as a Moving Checklist, are available on our website.
Move Day: On move day, your Crew Chief will oversee the move logistics and facilitate communication to insure that you are satisfied with the quality of service. Should you have additional questions or concerns, your Move Coordinator is available to you at this time as well.
Post/After Move: Although we have received many complements about our movers and service, we are nonetheless human and, upon occasion, mistakes do happen. Should any damages occur on your move, our dedicated repair man will ensure a satisfactory, timely resolution.
Anatomy of a Mover
Washington Post article. "Inspired by Swift, Joe Kinneary Is the Gentle Giant of His Own Gulliver's."
Phil McCombs, Washington Post Staff Writer, March 16, 2002

He will move you. Joe Kinneary is a big guy, 290 pounds of pure brawn on a 6-foot-5 frame in a loose black jogging suit, his Australian bush hat jammed atop great unruly masses of golden locks that cascade toward oak-solid shoulders. 

In Boston once, he helped move Yo-Yo Ma's concert grand. It weighed 1,200 pounds and took four guys with special, seven-foot piano boards, the movers weighing 1,000 pounds total themselves, which gave them just enough heft to (very gently) strap the de-legged piano body to the stout boards and slide it (very, very carefully) out of the building. 

In Washington, Kinneary started his own company with "a dozen pads, two dollies and a rental truck." He called it Gulliver's Movers and adopted a slogan, "Swift & Gentle Giants." In a decade-plus, he's built a thriving outfit with 16 trucks and 40 full-time movers.

That's five tons of sweat-soaked manhood -- young guys who in other lives have been, or still are, soldiers, musicians, comics, athletes, writers, waiters, drifters, urban cowboys and Romeos like "the Mover 'G,' yeah, just call me the Mover 'G!' " who've faded like nameless French Legionnaires into the vast urban sprawl a step ahead of former girlfriends. 

He's moved the rich and famous, as well as young couples able to afford professionals for the first time. He's moved Sen. Ted Kennedy ("He was really nice, it took a week"), author Larry McMurtry, and Sen. Jim Sasser after he lost in the Republican takeover of '94 ("Thank you for the excellent manner in which your company moved my office"). 

"Remember when we moved that little French lady?" his old buddy and right-hand man Billy Geisen reminisces. "She had so much stuff, we had 10 guys on that move and at 6-4, I was the smallest!" 

"And remember the dominatrix?" Kinneary asks. 

"Yeah, I was carrying a box of [sex toys]!" says Geisen, who, in another and concurrent life, is a professional comedian -- though he swears he's not making this one up. "She was as tall as you and me, and she had things to tie people down." 

"A whipping post is what it was," Kinneary recalls with a grin. "We moved it to West Virginia." 

There are tender moments, too. "We moved an old Army colonel and his wife into a retirement home," Kinneary muses. "He was in his eighties, he'd been a tank commander in Europe and was quite a character. They moved into this place to spend their remaining years. I was touched to see how close they were in their old age." 

Later that day, Kinneary, taking a break near his warehouse, relaxes at St. Elmo's Coffee Pub in Alexandria. 

"Have you read 'Gulliver's Travels' recently?" he asks. 

Not hardly. 

"It's interesting. Swift shows how petty people can be. His travels describe the different types Gulliver encounters, and Swift satirizes the politicians of his day -- Tories, Whigs -- and deists, people who believed that man is a reasonable being who, through science and reason, could achieve societal perfection." 

The big guy shakes his head, sips his coffee. 

"Swift, he's such a great writer, you have to read it slowly and savor it. One place Gulliver travels, he meets the Houyhnhnms, the rational horses. They're almost better than humans, and they run the country. They look down on the Yahoos, beastly looking humanoids -- dirty, bad-mannered, violent. 

"Then Gulliver travels to another country, where the inhabitants are called Brobdingnagians. These people are giants, they're
not pretty. 

"But they have beautiful hearts." 

It is dawn. 

In Gulliver's cavernous, box-stuffed Alexandria warehouse this Saturday morning, men are hustling -- sorting boxes and equipment, checking schedules, preparing for the day's 10 moves. Outside, 24-foot diesel trucks snort to life. 

"You got a dolly?" a guy shouts. 

"Hey, Joe," says another, "you put me on an office move?" 

Kinneary is right in there, working with the men, checking off details on his clipboard as his black Lab, Tipper, follows him everywhere. He grabs some dollies and manhandles them aboard a truck -- you've got to have plenty of dollies for an office move. 

Ovando Therwell, four years a crew chief -- a lithe, muscled guy with a colorful scarf around his head and an unlit cigarette over his right ear -- will supervise this one. 

"I'm going to put extra guys on it, so we can knock it out," he tells Jack "Puck" Comer, who's standing in the bed of a truck. "You got a riser?" 

Comer does. He wants to know if the job is near a subway stop, so he can make a quick getaway at day's end. (He's got another job waiting tables, "$15 an hour, and I only gotta lift trays!") The move is a lawyer's office in downtown Washington, so that's convenient. 

"I started on office furniture," Comer confides. "It's my favorite stuff. There's no loose stuff, like exercise bikes. No chowder." 

"Chowder" is mover argot -- Kinneary first learned it in Boston, where movers pronounce it chow-dah! -- for the loose, fiddly items that are unwieldy and take up a lot of time. 

Not all the guys are huge. "If you have the right tools, it's a piece of cake," Kinneary explains. "You don't have to be super-strong. You let the equipment do the work." 

Quatrell Walker, an Army enlisted man who does moving in his spare time, pats Tipper in passing, exclaiming, "Get motivated, Tipper!" 

"My fiancee wonders what we do on the job," Walker chuckles. "This office move now, it's estimated at 10 or 12 hours, but now we got eight guys on it, it'll go faster. Sometimes we get tips," he adds. "People are nice, usually they ask us if we're hungry, or buy a pizza. That's another good little perk." 

Just before 8 a.m., when all trucks and men are to be on the road, Kinneary strides into the warehouse office, shovels some dog food into a bowl for Tipper and makes a final schedule check. 

"Some days," he quips, "we're swifter and gentler than others." Some damage is inevitable, too; Kinneary maintains relationships with repair shops and tries to resolve customer complaints immediately. 

The office walls are festooned with miscellaneous humor ("AXIOMS: No Such Thing as Petty Cash . . . Damsels in Distress Run the World"), mementos (a picture of a B-17 Flying Fortress of the 8th Air Force, his dad's World War II unit), wisdom (Wilfred Peterson: "Sooner or later, a man [learns] that if he always gives his best, his average will break well") and practical advice ("SPINETS & UPRIGHTS 10 COMMANDMENTS: Disassemble music board . . . Put straps through piano board, buckles stay on pad"). 

Prominent also: a tattered "Resolutions for Old Age," by Kinneary's hero Jonathan Swift (1667-1745), dean of St. Patrick's Cathedral (Dublin) and the foremost prose satirist in English of his era: 

Not to marry a young woman. 

Not to be peevish, or morose, or suspicious. 

Not to tell the same story over and over to the same people.

Not to be fond of children, or let them come near me hardly.

Kinneary watches his troops roar off in the big trucks to the day's moving sites. "I don't even think of it as work anymore," he says. "This is my family. I'm mesmerized by the action, addicted to it. I love it!" (He works 12 hours a day, six days a week; Sundays he attends church, but remains on call even there.) 

Jumping into the van with Tipper -- they'll rove from job to job throughout the day -- he adds with a flourish of poetic enthusiasm, "When I jump into a truck, I smell it, I feel the seat sticky with body sweat and I think of all the people who drove it! 

"Moving trucks have a lot of stories to tell, I think they have a life of their own. There's a spirit to each one, and a truck comes to life when it has the right man behind the wheel." 

Kinneary, 46, was born in London, one of four children of a U.S. civilian employed by the military and a housewife. The family lived in a dozen European countries and the United States, and when he was 16, Kinneary got a moving job at NATO headquarters in Belgium. 

"It was a match," the big guy quips. "Anatomy is destiny." He later went to the University of Ohio, studying political science, and got an MBA at Xavier University. He worked as a mover during college and grad school. 

Then, as young men will, he drifted. He tried various cities, various jobs, but always returned to moving. 

In Boston, Kinneary worked with some of the best movers in the world, picking up tips on furniture protection and other essentials that Gulliver's uses today. Most furniture he moves now, for example, is tightly wrapped in plastic sheets. 

"There are a lot of unsung heros in this business," he realized. "It's hard work, a hard industry. You don't hear about the extra hours and the huge effort involved. It's very stressful." 

On the other hand, "I picked this industry because there's a change of atmosphere every day. You meet new people, get a picture of their lives, help them out -- and make a living at it. 

"It's sort of a nonconformist thing, too. A lot of people come to Washington hoping for important jobs in government, but I just didn't want to be stuck in some government office down a hallway in front of a computer watching the clock. I wanted adventure." 

Like Gulliver. 

On his journeys, Kinneary had deepened what had been a casual relationship with Swift's "Gulliver's Travels," the savage 1726 satire on English politics and culture that remains a classic commentary on mankind's hypocrisy, immorality and general stupidity. 

One day in Boston, talking with an old buddy of his dreams for his own moving company, the book came up. "That's it," his friend exclaimed. "You're Gulliver!" 

Driving to Washington -- yet another voyage to yet another city -- Kinneary came up with his "Swift & Gentle Giants" slogan,
borrowing the "Gentle Giants" part from a Boston company. 

He was on his way to his dream, sustained now -- as we all must be -- by a powerful personal mythos. His life would be illumined by a Brobdingnagian dreamscape peopled by giants of generous spirit and clear moral vision. 

"The Learning of this People is very defective," Swift had written satirically, "consisting only in Morality, History, Poetry and Mathematicks. . . . But, the last of these is wholly applied to what may be useful in Life . . . so that among us it would be little esteemed."


Kinneary would be useful, honest, kind -- no Yahoo but rather a giant and gentle knight sallying swiftly through the dawn into the great metroplex, an unsung hero, rescuer of damsels in distress, friend of harried housewives and powerful senators alike, servant of the helpless, helper of the mighty as they face the famously traumatic ordeal of a Move. 

"Some other mover doesn't show up, the family's desperate, they call us," he says. "It happened recently: A lady got stiffed by another mover because it was raining and they wouldn't work. I drove the truck around-the-clock for her, I was awake 24 hours." 

Another time: "A couple was splitting up. The husband was in their country house with the kids, and the wife called from Bethesda to take the stuff out in a hurry before he returned. The sheriff was there because the husband was armed. 

"We did the job and ran like hell. It was load and go!" 

Indeed, on a recent day customers seemed satisfied. "Their work was great, they were sprinting back and forth from the house to the truck," reported Douglas Cooper, whose family Gulliver's moved from a small Chevy Chase house to a larger one. "They came in under the estimate, too. We saved $300 or $400." 

Theresa Gregory, who moved that same day from a Washington apartment to Alexandria, said she was "pleased, but it took a little longer than estimated. All in all . . . they were very conscientious." 

The recent Saturday morning law office move goes well, too. As the Gulliver's team swings into action, attorneys Nina Graybill and Elaine English stand watching nervously. 

"I found them through a friend and used them for an apartment move," English says. 

Later, she reports, the move to new offices nearby "went beautifully. . . . It was very pleasant being moved by them." 

At noon, English says, Kinneary had gone "to get food for the guys, and he brought food for my partner and me, too. Burritos! 

"I thought it was very, very sweet." 

Day is done. 

Behind the warehouse, the Mover "G" lounges and smokes. "We get to see a lot of nice homes," he says. "Oh, man. Some people live really nice. You think, 'There's a closet,' but it's an elevator!" 

Mike DePugh joins him. He's 54, been moving a long time. "It had a full theater, a billiard room," he chimes in, "an indoor Olympic pool. They fed us well -- trays of assorted sandwiches, roast beef." 

Casually, he squats and rises on one leg -- to show he can do it. The Mover "G," much younger, tries but can't pull it off as smoothly. 

Inside, Kinneary's grabbing a quick end-of-day nap in his darkened office (ratty bookcases full of cast-off literature, Dali's "Crucifixion" on one wall, on another a poster of scantily clad women astride motorcycles). 

Firing up a cigar, he rounds up Tipper and they head for a neighborhood doggie playground crowded with mutts and owners ("It's a blast for the dogs, but I never got a date here"), where the big guy repeatedly hurls a saliva-soaked tennis ball that Tipper often manages to catch in midair. 

Finally, Kinneary heads home -- a rented place he shares with a brother and a couple of the guys who work for him. 

"I used to socialize, go to embassy parties," he confides wearily, "but nowadays I'm so tired. The men and the trucks come first. I go home and eat, flip on the History Channel, and I'm asleep." 

His house is like a hunting camp, the ultimate bachelor pad, a hodgepodge of stuffed chairs, couches, pictures, books, knickknacks, all of clashing colors and styles, everything slightly faded -- "stuff people gave us from different moves." 

He does have a few personal items -- his Bible from third grade, for instance, commemorating his first communion March 2, 1963, is on a coffee table in the living room. 

In the kitchen, unwashed dishes spill across countertops. There's a picture of Kinneary's dad -- as a young lieutenant on duty in London in 1944. Behind him, a map with heavy battle lines. 

DePugh comes in, snags a beer from the fridge, flips on the TV. 

Kinneary flops on the sofa, still fielding cell phone calls about tomorrow's moving jobs. 

Finally, things calm down. The big guy yawns mightily. "There was a woman I moved down to Florida once," he muses, "and we talked all the way down. 

"Her husband had been a machine gunner on a B-17. He was shot down in France, and the whole crew died except him. A French family hid him, and the French dug an extra grave to convince the Germans that he'd died also. He made it back to the American lines. She was delightful and humorous. 

"It was a real pleasure to move her."