A setback

Ok, I admit it, that post title is just an attention-grabber, but we are sad to report some disappointing news.  After all the build up to the tag sale, the making of signs, the staging stuff in the garage,  we’ve had to postpone it for a week due to yet another big snow storm.  But this one really could be the last time we see snow for a while. For real this time.

But what we didn’t accomplish in tag sales we got done in other preparations.  This week were able to solidify a lot of our plans and select the companies we’re going to use.

• We confirmed the pet transport company we will use and started filling out their paperwork.
• We booked two of the three flights for our July trip east to visit our families. I had been following fares and checking pretty regularly, so when they dropped we jumped and booked the flights.  For these domestic flights I found Kayak almost always had the best fares.  I did find one interesting thing though. I initially ran a search through and found a good fare, but realized I’d only specified one traveller.  When I went back through and changed it to three travelers the fare disappeared.  When I tried two travelers it reappeared, so I ended up booking doing two bookings, one for Kelly and Hopscotch and one for me, and then selected seats all together.
• I narrowed down and contacted a few property management companies since I will no longer be able to manage our rental duplex myself.  I’ve heard some horror stories about property management companies so this is one of the things about the move I’m more nervous about.
• We have a date booked (this coming tuesday) to have new carpet installed in the upstairs of the house.
• The representative from the moving company came to to survey the house and provide an official estimate for shipping our stuff to NZ. One funny thing is that the local moving company that the shipper uses is the same one that we used to move into our current house and really liked.
• And most excitedly, we have our flight booked to New Zealand!  We decided to do a stopover on our way to decompress a little after all the hubub of planning and moving.  We considered Tokyo and Hong Kong but decided to stopover in Fiji for 5 days before heading to Auckland.

Having the flight to NZ is big because it allows us to move forward on a lot of other planning that revolves around that date, such as arranging the pet transport and quarantine reservation, arranging our short-term accommodation when we arrive in Auckland, and booking the crate to ship all of our stuff there.  Psychologically, between talking with the movers and booking our flights it really feels real now.

We have one more weekend before the house goes on the market so pushing the tag sale back a week isn’t horrible (the weather for next weekend looks beautiful as of now), but it does mean it’ll probably be a pretty frantic time and we’ll try and do some work this weekend (especially painting) to get the house ready to show.