It’s been a slower week after the all the frenetic activity of the yard sale, listing the house and going under contract. A nice change in other words. The buyers had their inspection over the weekend, but that made up most of the activity on the migration front.
The only other goings on was to confirm our moving date with the shippers and send them the initial paperwork and deposit, both of which were pretty minimal compared to what’s ahead. For now they’re planning on two days for the move – a day of packing (August 9th) and a day of moving everything into the container (August 10th). We’ll do as much packing as we can, but the movers will pack up all of the breakables. There are two options for shipping your stuff when doing an overseas move. If you don’t have too much, you can do it by palette where they basically put everything on a palette(s), shrink wrap it and charge you by weight. The other option is to ship your goods by container, either 20′ or 40′. Yes, those colorful trailer things that they stack on ships. We don’t have a ton of stuff so we’re getting a 20′ container. The advantage is that with this option you are charged by the size of the container, but it doesn’t matter how full you stuff it or how much it weighs.
It’s a bit counterintuitive, but the advice we have found online is to bring as much stuff as you can. You might think when you’re moving halfway around the world you would want to divest yourself of as much as you can and buy what you need when you get there. But it turns out that a lot of things are more expensive in NZ due to its location out in the middle of nowhere, so it’s better to stuff the container with everything you might possibly want. So exactly three months from now a 20′ container will be parked in front of our house. The next day it’ll be filled up and loaded back onto a truck and brought to the train yard, where it will go by rail to L.A. From there it’ll be loaded onto a container ship that may or may not go directly to New Zealand. All in all we’re told to expect it to take 60-70 days from when it leaves Denver to arrive in Auckland.
Kiwi Bound 