The packing company representative visited our house yesterday to eyeball all our stuff and give us a time estimate for how long it will take to box up. After a few minutes of Q & A and some scribbling on a form, he announced: 3500 pounds and 2 days of moving. yikes. We are pretty sure he is overestimating our stuff, as a significant portion of our “pile” is empty boxes that we’ve been saving for the move (i.e. the TV box, the globe’s box, etc.).
His advice? Take everything that is breakable out of the boxes you might have it currently stored in so that it can be repacked, even if they are the original boxes. Thus, our myriad wedding glasses and dishes need to be repacked.
He also, as many have mentioned, reminded us to put our packed (for the trip) luggage into a closed closet, or even in the car, to keep it from going into the crate. He also suggested putting the UAB (air shipment) into a different room, so that it could be packed by weight there, and not accidentally get mixed up with the HHE (boat shipment).
We have about 450 pounds for our air freight, and he said that the sturdy boxes they use to pack it in weigh about 12 pounds each.
This morning I saw another FS family getting packed out of our building, and saw the guys loading up the wooden crates. The crates were inside a large moving truck, and were about the size of a standard bathroom. They were lined with polyethylene and tightly packed. They were puzzling out the best way to arrange the remaining non-square bits (a bike, some skinny long things, and a weird spherical object, all of which were wrapped in 3″ of bubble and brown kraft paper) when I walked by.
For us, he estimated two crates for the boat shipment, which is not a full container. This company prefers to pack the crates on site here, and then wait until a container is available before bringing the crates to the dock to load into the container. Apparently, the usual method before was to bring a truck full of boxes to the dock to await a boat, but a lot of people were loosing their possessions to water damage and loss. At the docks, they just throw a tarp over stuff if it looks like rain.
I’ve read a couple of other blogs recently which describe moving losses, so I hope we’re not disappointed when our stuff arrives in Dhaka.
Neko and Panda's 