PCS: Day Two and Three
After the first day of packing was complete, my nerves immediately calmed down. We couldn’t have asked for a better moving company to handle the job. They were incredibly respectful and looked like they were doing very thorough work.
Of course, we’ll see how everything looks on the other side, but I think they did great from our end . I only took video from days one, two, and three, because it was the biggest and most taxing. The other two moves happened the same way, but only took hours (1-4 hours) instead of days to complete.
Here’s a short clip of day two:
And here’s day three (the final day of moving our household goods):
I’m actually surprised that I didn’t have an ugly-cry moment just before they left. One of the men told me, “Don’t worry, ma’am, this is what we do; we’ll take good care of your stuff.” I almost lost it, but somehow held it together.
From what I hear, once we find a place to live in Italy, our stuff (providing it’s there) will be delivered to us. We’ll then have the option of having the (Italian) movers unpack and set everything up, or we can cut open the boxes and unpack everything ourselves. My husband wants to do that latter, because he thinks it’ll be like Christmas morning. I’m leaning towards having them do it, because it seems like a lot of work to unpack a whole house! We shall see; maybe we can do a combination of both.
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| taken from a “dumb” phone. don’t judge! |
And in case you’re wondering, this is what our first night without our things looked like. We still had camping chairs for one more night, so we used them along with boxes (aka our table). We’ve also been using an air mattress a friend let us borrow.
Staying at home without anything hasn’t been as bad as I thought, although we did run into a little bad luck a couple days ago. My husband’s laptop crashed (it has something to do with the motherboard, which is never a good sign), and my DVD drive decided to stop working, so it’s currently at the Apple store (hopefully) getting fixed. It’s been a little frustrating, but I’m just happy these things happened now instead of when we were overseas or in transit.
So there you have it! I hope you’ve enjoed the videos. I’m really excited to film more when we move, so I hope you don’t mind listening to me talk!
I've always unpacked our stuff myself. I just liked having the control of knowing where things would go, instead of directing people. And anyway, they just unwrap the stuff and put it places. Much easier to do it myself! I always started with the essentials (the kitchen) and went from there.
I don't know of anyone who has the movers unwrap for you. You can direct the boxes to go to the rooms you'd like so (in my opinion) it is silly to have them unwrap just to have you rearrange later!
What an exciting time, I hope you love it!
(Also. Grandma would probably throw in some comment about not trusting the Italians with her good crystal or something silly like that.)
We always tell them which room we want the boxes/ furniture in, but then we do most of the unpacking ourselves. I've heard they can be kinda rough when they unpack things. Just make sure they put all the furniture together that they took apart!!
I would definitely be the one unpacking so I could really figure out where I wanted things.
Hahaha I love the photo of your post boxes set up! It SO reminds me of our set up just 3 months ago! These are the things I look forward to telling my kids about. Sleeping on the floor, eating off of paper plates for what seems like months, and trying to make a make-shift living room out of lawn chairs and laptops! LOVE IT! And I definitely agree with your huubby, unpacking your own stuff is the way to go! I just wanted those movers out of my house and away from my stuff so I could fix things the way I wanted them.
I do the unpacking myself, except for the wardrobe boxes. I figure that it's pretty hard to mess up taking clothes out of a box and hanging them on the bar in the closet.
When they unpack, they won't put anything away – they'll literally just take it out of the box and pile it all on the floor next to whatever box they just took it out of. For me, it's less stressful to see a stack of boxes than to look at piles of stuff *everywhere*. (Plus, there's no way I could keep our kids from messing with the piles!!!) Then I unpack one room at a time.
The one exception is any box that looks to have been even a little crushed. My biggest tip about moving-in day: keep your camera handy!! Take pictures of anything and everything that might begin to look suspicious or damaged to you. Take pictures of the crates, if necessary (we just received our UAB shipment, and everything fell over in the crate!). Take pictures of any boxes that look even a little crushed – be sure to include the number of the box in the photo. Take pictures of the movers unpacking it. Take pictures of anything that's broken or damaged.
The benefit of them unpacking is that they'll then take all of the packing material and boxes with them! However, moving companies in Italy will come back to remove the boxes and packing material for you. All you have to do is call them.