Packing up our house

It's hard to believe that our time is Saudi is coming to a close.  There have been so many things to do in order to prepare for our move, and perhaps the biggest task was to get our house packed up.  When we moved to Saudi, we came to furnished housing, so all of the furniture belongs to the compound.  Since we moved, we have had two children and collected several large pieces of furniture and lots of stuff.

Before the movers came I had to inventory all of our belongings and assign a replacement dollar value to them.  This took me an entire week of working every day pulling everything out and getting it ready.    After I completed the inventory, I decided to do a little pre-packing organization.  Our shipment is broken into two categories: air and sea.  I knew that there would most likely be a language barrier with our movers, so I decided to try to make things as simple as possible.  This meant that I sorted and organized EVERYTHING.  I put all of the air shipment (600 pounds worth) items in Olivia's room.  Next, I organized the sea shipment into categories.  I put all of the master bedroom stuff together, all of the kids clothing and stuff together, all the decoration in another pile, etc.  My hope was that having it more organized on this side would allow it to be easier to unpack in the US, but it left the house a MESS!

Decoration and Living Room Contents

Master Bedroom Contents

Kids stuff

Air Shipment

When the moving company came to do an estimate of how much stuff we had, they told us it would take 4 to 5 days to pack everything up, so we braced ourselves for a LONG week.  On Sunday, February 16th, the guys showed up and we were blessed to have a double crew!  They got the air shipment packed, the entire upstairs, and even some of the downstairs done on the very first day!!  I was absolutely amazed, because this was 75% of the stuff we had to ship.

The next day they came back with yet another double crew, and I knew they'd be able to finish that day!!  The saved all of the fragile pieces and picture frames to be crated in wooden boxes, so that took the majority of their day.  By 4:30 they were finished, we signed all of the paperwork, and the truck was off.

And just like that, our stuff was on it's way to the US.  The air shipment should arrive in Houston the first week of March, and the sea shipment should come some time in May.  One step closer to being back in the US!  :)