Once we got our medical clearance, we received our official orders and we were onto whole-heartedly preparing for our movers.
When moving overseas, you have 4 shipments...
Unaccompanied Goods (UG)
Household Goods (HHG)
Storage
Accompanied Baggage
I am a fairly organized person. Ok, most of the time I am a super organized person. Yet, this division of all our worldly possessions into 4 shipments was a serious challenge. We wanted to be very wise about what went where and when, plus, we needed to downsize.
For our UG shipment, we literally stood on a friend's borrowed bathroom scale and weighed everything. No joke. We finally quit adding to the pile when we'd weighed out 923 lbs. of the 1,000 lbs. allowance.
All this went out to our garage and was our first shipment to leave. It was packed and picked up on a Tuesday in a four short hours. It goes by plane and should arrive in Belgium about a month and a half from the day it left.
Next up was our HHG. Our same packers from our UG, who were really awesome, thankfully, came back that same week on Thursday and began packing the rest of the stuff we were shipping overseas by boat. It's projected that the earliest we'll see it is 2 and a half months from the day it left. (I am hopeful that they estimate the worst case scenario.) The trickiest part of this shipment was that the other 2 remaining shipments had to be sorted and separated from this before they began packing it. A lot of energy and brain cells went into this. HHG actually left a day early because our packers were hard workers and we'd downsized so much that we shipped less than 3/4 of our original weight estimate.
A week after the HHG left, we shipped off our storage stuff. It stays here in ND till we get our next assignment stateside and I suspect after 3 years, we won't really want to see any of it again! Mostly, the storage shipment was holiday boxes and other garage/yard items, books and 120v appliances.
The day our storage left, we moved out of the house. We'd been camping in it, sleeping on the floor, and cooking with borrowed kitchen gear, so the TLF felt posh and wonderful when we checked in. Unfortunately, it took 4 car loads to get our accompanied baggage to the TLF. Thus, we spent the next couple days scrambling to clean our house to turn it over and then whittle down our belongings by mailing as much as possible.
As it stands, we have 9 small/medium suitcases, 5 backpacks, 2 diaper bags, 1 pack-n-play, 1 umbrella stroller, plus a car tote with a few activities and food for the trek south. This allis crammed has been thoughtfully puzzle-pieced into the van...after we mailed 20 boxes to our APO address.
The photo doesn't even show all of the stuff we mailed! I'm not so sure this is the first impression the Hubs wanted to make on the two mail guys at his office...
I am a fairly organized person. Ok, most of the time I am a super organized person. Yet, this division of all our worldly possessions into 4 shipments was a serious challenge. We wanted to be very wise about what went where and when, plus, we needed to downsize.
For our UG shipment, we literally stood on a friend's borrowed bathroom scale and weighed everything. No joke. We finally quit adding to the pile when we'd weighed out 923 lbs. of the 1,000 lbs. allowance.
Next up was our HHG. Our same packers from our UG, who were really awesome, thankfully, came back that same week on Thursday and began packing the rest of the stuff we were shipping overseas by boat. It's projected that the earliest we'll see it is 2 and a half months from the day it left. (I am hopeful that they estimate the worst case scenario.) The trickiest part of this shipment was that the other 2 remaining shipments had to be sorted and separated from this before they began packing it. A lot of energy and brain cells went into this. HHG actually left a day early because our packers were hard workers and we'd downsized so much that we shipped less than 3/4 of our original weight estimate.
A week after the HHG left, we shipped off our storage stuff. It stays here in ND till we get our next assignment stateside and I suspect after 3 years, we won't really want to see any of it again! Mostly, the storage shipment was holiday boxes and other garage/yard items, books and 120v appliances.
The day our storage left, we moved out of the house. We'd been camping in it, sleeping on the floor, and cooking with borrowed kitchen gear, so the TLF felt posh and wonderful when we checked in. Unfortunately, it took 4 car loads to get our accompanied baggage to the TLF. Thus, we spent the next couple days scrambling to clean our house to turn it over and then whittle down our belongings by mailing as much as possible.
As it stands, we have 9 small/medium suitcases, 5 backpacks, 2 diaper bags, 1 pack-n-play, 1 umbrella stroller, plus a car tote with a few activities and food for the trek south. This all
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