shipping boxes to italy: it's all here!

Fantastic news: all of our boxes arrived safe and sound a few days ago! In typical Italian fashion there wasn't a call to schedule a drop-off...just a ring of the doorbell and a really nice Italian dude saying "venti cassete" (20 boxes). He and Rob unloaded the boxes in about ten minutes.

Rob immediately set about unpacking. Rob's a bit of a nerd (did you guys know that?) and couldn't wait to fill our bookshelves with the ridiculous amount of books that we sent over. He was also really excited to see our cheese dome (confession: I was, too). Scoff if you want, but if you are a cheese person the dome will change your life.

I was working in the dining room (our temporary office) and Rob would pop in every few minutes to show off something that hadn't broken (which was everything). He'd say, "Can you believe our wine decanter made it here? I must be an awesome packer." When I replied with "Or, it could be that UPakWeShip did a really good job taking care of our stuff," he made a face and, in typical only child fashion, was not happy to share the glory :-)

OUR FINAL REVIEW

Honestly, we can't say enough nice things about UPakWeShip and how easy it was to work with them. Yes, they gave us complimentary shipping in exchange for our review, but as anyone that knows me well can tell you, I do not mess around when it comes to being honest about customer service. Actually, I hink there is also a woman in the New York Times customer service office that would have a few choice things to say about what happens when I get bad service. Moral of the story: I'm telling you it was awesome to work with UPakWeShip because it was. If it hadn't been a good experience, you would totally know!

If you need to ship anything abroad in the near future, we highly recommend UPakWeShip. We shipped a fairly small amount over -- 20 small boxes -- but still always felt like everyone we talked to felt our shipment was important (even before we worked out the complimentary shipping). The folks in their Charleston office are extremely nice (and funny), the people we interacted with in the UK were equally as wonderful, and the shuttle driver here in Italy was fantastic, too. Highly recommened.

moving to italy: shipping update

It's been about a month since we last updated you on our shipping progress and experiences with UPakWeShip. We still have nothing but positive things to say about this great company.

We received an email when our "boat" was about a day or two from docking in the UK that our container had been randomly selected for a customs search. We filled out an extra form, but found the entire process very easy. I think customs cost about $80...so not too bad and UPakWeShip had prepped us that this could happen -- containers are selected randomly so there is no way to predict it. We cleared customs and our stuff is now en route to Florence.

We are working with our contact at the shipping company to book a shuttle service for our delivery. Because our street is one way and narrow as heck, bringing a trailer down the road is just not possible. Since we only have twenty small boxes, a shuttle service (even in a fairly tiny truck) is much more practical. We'll keep you posted on how it all goes.

We are SO excited to have our stuff here with us. I'm tired of looking at empty shelves and just want to fill them with our books and photos!

Moving to Italy: Shipping Your Stuff, Part Two

I'll be the first to admit that the process of getting our stuff packed took a bit longer than we thought. It's not just packing -- it's going through every single thing and asking "store it? trash it? pack it?" We wanted to store as little as possible and it was really time-consuming to go through everything.

Seeing the truck pull up on Wednesday to wisk our stuff away was a huge relief (and also really exciting). It's kind of cool to know the next time we see our stuff it will be in Florence!

This second video is all about the final stages of packing. Initially, we planned to record more video at home, but got sooo busy with other stuff that we just ran out of time. Still, I think future movers will find this video helpful.

Interesting notes from the move...

1. The guy that drove the freight truck that picked up our boxes was one of the nicest people ever! He was so patient with us when we realized we forgot to tape freight bills to the boxes.

2. UPakWeShip emailed the next day to check to see how it went. I love low-key (but good) customer service.

Moving to Italy: Shipping Your Stuff, Part One

Sorry we're a bit behind with posting our shipping videos. We had a few small things to take care of this week. You know, like selling our car, finishing up the packing and spending 4 hours at the Italian Consulate in Philly. Just small stuff :-)

Behold our first shipping video. Shipping your stuff abroad isn't very glamorous, but it's a necessary part of the process. We tried to snap as much video as we could to fill you in on the process.

This whole moving abroad thing is full of mysteries. We've been lucky that our shipping provider, UPakWeShip has been sooo helpful and answered about a gazillion of our questions. Our hope with these videos is to share the knowledge that we've collected and help people that make the move in the future!

The FTC would probably want us to tell you that UPakWeShip is providing our shipping services free of cost since we're going to be talking about them so much on the blog and in videos. We promise to be completely honest and tell you if UPakWeShip sets all of our belongings on fire and posts a video of it to YouTube, but so far their service has been nothing short of rock star status.

UPDATE: Numerous times in this video and our next one Rob mentions "meters" instead of "feet." He means to say feet...I'm pretty sure his inner nerd is just really excited to be on the metric system.

Moving to Italy: Getting Rid of Stuff

I really wanted to use a cuss word instead of "stuff" in the title of this post, but I fought the urge.

Seriously, there is no better realization of how much crap you own until you try to move. We have moved no less than 5 times in as many years, yet every single time we pack up, I'm fascinated by (a) how much we have no problem trashing (b) how much we own.

We have never lived in a space over 1250 square feet (and if you exclude our house in Louisville, we've never lived over 600 square feet) and have a very clean, minimal style. YET, we still have -- what we would consider -- a lot of stuff. It's crazy!

I'm so thankful we are only shipping 30 cubic feet of belongings. That equates to about 18 small packing boxes. I love the idea of owning only things that really mean a lot to me and foregoing the rest. We're bring mostly books, some items for our kitchens and a few keepsakes. That's it. It feels sooo good.

We'll be posting some videos early this week all about the packing process, so stay tuned!

P.S. We are definitely not hoarders...but when you are in the middle of packing up your life you can certainly be made to feel like one!