From Here to There – A Move Across an Ocean

When we first set up our shipment stuff in the States, they told us that the air shipments usually took ~3 weeks to arrive, and the sea shipments were averaging 50 days to arrive.  So we figured we wouldn’t see our sea shipment until the middle of September sometime.  But it arrived on Friday!!  Woo-Hoo!

We had to figure out a day when we could get the rental furniture out and our shipment in on the same day.  Friday was that day.  The Dutch rental furniture guys said they could be here at 8am Friday morning to pick up everything.  And I do mean everything….. down to silverware, towels, and the iron!!

I had slowly been picking up a few things here and there, but honestly I had already forgotten when I had sent with the sea shipment and what I had put in storage.  So I didn’t want to buy something that would arrive with the sea shipment.

7am and the alarm goes off on Friday morning and the sun is just beginning to come up.  MyMan and I get up, and he realizes that the rental company guys have just shown up!!  Ack!!!  We rush to throw on some clothes and meet them.  The girls are still sleeping upstairs.  I rush to get them up and dressed.  Luckily I had separated the few items we had purchased from all the rented stuff.  We just had to strip the beds of the linens.  Easy enough.

 

The guys got busy getting everything taken apart, packaged, labeled, and loaded up in their truck.  Very quickly, the house went from mostly full to very empty!

 

 

I had to run the girls to school, and when I got back, I see our sea shipment truck has arrived, and the rental furniture guys are leaving…. the trucks literally pass each other on our street!!  Talk about great timing!  It was 8:50am.

It really is amazing just how big these sea shipment containers are!  The house we are in is about half the size of our old Houston house, so we sold a lot of stuff, stored half of what was left over, and brought the other half.  There was so much room left over in that container!!  And they gave me the lock when they cut if off to open the container… that was pretty cool.
 

 

There were 5 guys who started unloading our stuff.  They handed us the list of our stuff, and as they came through the door, they told us the number on the box, I would look it up on the list, check it off, and tell them where to put the box.  It went very quickly actually.  They were finished unloading the container by 11am or so.  The rooms were getting more and more full.  It was nice seeing our furniture and how it started fitting into the space.  All in all, there ended up being ~170 boxes or items that had to be checked off.

 

 

 

But honestly, after a while I started having a panic attack because there was just SO MUCH STUFF EVERYWHERE!!!  And we can’t just throw out all the boxes and paper with the trash… it has to all be recycled (that’s another post for another day).  But needless to say, we were WAY over our paper bin limit…. with about a thousand kilos of paper left to get rid of!!

Luckily for me – the movers were awesome guys, and they took away all the cardboard boxes and wrapping paper.  So my sanity was saved.  The guys spent a few hours unwrapped and unboxing everything.  They don’t put it away, but they do get everything out, and inspect it to make sure nothing’s broken.  We only had one small mishap with a slider door on our entertainment center.  Not bad!!

It was time to get the girls from school, and when I picked them up I told them their stuff had arrived.  They were super excited to see our things!

They ran upstairs and immediately started sorting their toys and belongings.  Next thing I know, Littlest comes down wearing this, and strikes a pose.

 

Now I have the fun task of making a home for all of our belongings and getting organized.  We had to buy a few more pieces of furniture for storage purposes…so I also have the pleasure of putting more stuff together (thank you IKEA)!!

But it’s coming along… and finally starting to really feel like home!