We have container! May 20, 2006
Well, after three months without stuff, we now have our stuff!
Surprisingly, the delivery of our container went relatively smoothly. Four movers and two trucks arrived promptly at 8:30 am last Friday morning. The weather was partly overcast but dry; our friends Ken, Anne, & Scott were here to help; I had prepared the manifest with directions on which rooms to deliver each item.
The movers instructed us to lay out our 15 page manifest and as they came in with each item, they’d yell out the item number, we were to tick it off on the list, and then tell them where to go with it. As you might recall, we had over 700 items on our manifest. Four movers moving quite quickly yelling out numbers was hard to keep up with but we rose to the challenge. Ken became the ticker-offer, I stood at the door directing, Bruce, Anne, & Scott became the unwrapperers as we wanted the movers to take away as much of the wrappings as possible before they left.
Five+ hours later, the movers were done. We reviewed the manifest and noted several items were not yet accounted for: our three bikes, the vacuum cleaner, a giant wooden statue, and some ‘sporting equipment’. Hmmm, sounds like the kind of items that the Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry like to review. Off went one of the movers back to the warehouse and in no time at all she returned with the remainder of our items. Everything checked off except one mysterious box which we *think* we saw but weren’t quite sure. We signed off on the forms and away they went.
Ugh. House full of boxes and paper.
We spent most of the weekend unwrapping and unpacking the kitchen, bathroom, and bedrooms. The trick, you see, is to figure out what to unpack and what to move into storage as we are not really moving in, but gearing up to move out.
Yes, with three weeks to go before our return to the States, we need to get this house in shape to rent out as a furnished rental. This means we need to provide all the essentials of a home, but all of our personal stuff (of which we have quite a bit) must go into ‘hiding’. Thank god we have a gigantic attic and a very large back building just for this purpose. So…. each box must be opened, inventoried, and either unpacked or repacked for storage. We’re making progress.
And we’ve come up with some clever ideas on what to do with the wrappings…..
More photos to come…….
PS: The bane of my existence (kinda sorta), the wobbly dining room table which we should have burned in San Francisco but my spouse insisted it must come to New Zealand, arrived BROKEN as in ITS REALLY BROKEN AND CANT BE FIXED. Oh my. So now we are on the lookout for a replacement and the broken one sits lonely in pieces in the back building, waiting for one of us to come up with a clever idea as to how to ‘recycle’ it. I think it should be cut into pieces and used to make our garden beds. Other suggestions?
PSS: The only thing we have yet to account for are our skis and the top to Bruce’s workbench. We think they’re wrapped in with something else, but we can’t quite identify there whereabouts.
PSSS: Kudos to the San Francisco movers — they really did an amazing job packing up our stuff. Not one item that was in a box was broken. We did have some minor damage on two pieces of furniture that had castors (one of the castors broke off on each, but we can fix). Small price to pay really. All the important stuff is just fine.
