The logistics of moving your stuff overseas
We’ve known that we’re going to move for over a year, which means I’ve had a long time to look around at all our stuff and wonder what to do with it.
It’s one thing to move solo - I changed scenery a million times in my 20s and had it down to an art: stuff clothes in garbage bags, wrap dishes in plastic bags, leave all the unwanted things with my poor downtrodden parents.
But now I’m almost 40 (gasp!) and have a whole bunch of literal baggage. My children possess a metric ton of assorted plastic toys and chewed-up board books. I have a closet stuffed with work clothes I haven’t looked at since 2020. I have a fully furnished guest room for those two times a year when someone comes to visit.
And it’s one thing to move across town or even across country - you box everything up without thinking, pay someone to shove your couch into the back of a truck, and away you go.
But moving across an ocean is a whole different ball of wax. You pay for shipping by the cubic foot. Your things go through customs and inspections and are handled by many people. The timeline is weeks and months instead of hours and days.
I’ve been thinking about our other big moves as a married couple, how we did it, and how this time will be different.
The Vermont to London move, circa 2012
We’d been living in a two-bedroom apartment in Vermont for two years. I spent a month selling our nicer things online, and we held a garage sale to offload the rest. (Luckily, we lived above a thrift store so had built-in foot traffic looking for a bargain.)
Then we packed what we could into our 2006 Kia Spectra and another similar-sized rental car (Chevy Malibu, maybe?) and drove everything to my parents’ house in Wisconsin. We left a lot behind. The new tenant of our old apartment was a graduate student who we knew wouldn’t complain about being gifted some free stuff. We left the secondhand couch, our mattress and a stack of pillows (kind of gross, when I think about it), a whole set of dishes and Scrabble. I put a box marked “free” outside and watched from the window as passersby rummaged through the books and CDs. We took a couple bags of food and spices to another grad student who was grateful for the freebies and didn’t mind the ick factor of claiming someone else’s half-empty condiments.
When we got on the airplane, we just had our suitcases. The person at check-in was especially cruel and made me take stuff out of my bag rather than pay extra for oversized luggage. So I brought exactly 23 kilograms of clothes and shoes to England. My mom later shipped me a box of additional (now forgotten) clothes, which the post office made me pay import tax on. Totally not worth it, live and learn.
Total time from leaving our Vermont apartment to moving into our London apartment: 4 months
The London to Midwest move, circa 2015
This time we were living in a partially furnished one-bedroom apartment, which meant a lot of the furniture belonged to the apartment and was staying put. We abandoned some of our other things that weren’t worth paying to ship overseas (the IKEA bookshelf we had grabbed off the side of the road, for example).
And we paid the professionals to help us move the rest. They knocked on the door at 8am sharp. We were still asleep (you can tell this is before kids) and we jumped up. They had our things boxed up and on their truck in minutes. Because it was international shipping, they needed to personally pack everything up, so we didn’t have to prepare anything. The movers take ownership of our belongings as they go through customs so they need to know what exactly they’re claiming (i.e. nothing illegal). In 30 minutes, our apartment was empty and we didn’t live in London anymore.
We lugged a few bags to my husband’s brother’s house across town - this time he was the lucky recipient of our half-empty condiments. Then we flew over the ocean with a couple of big suitcases to crash at my brother’s house while we looked for jobs and a place to live.
The shipping company dropped off our stuff at my brother’s house a few weeks later. We had to move it again when we bought a house in a nearby city a month later. My parents drove down in a big truck to help us take everything from point A to B, and suddenly we had put down roots in a brand-new town.
Total time from leaving our London apartment to moving into our Midwest house: 4 months
The Little House to Big House move, circa 2020
This was our non-oceanic move, just taking our lives across town. Our first baby was about 15 months old and we’d upgraded to a larger home. Again, we paid the professionals. This time it was a cheap moving company that came and put everything in a truck. We were supposed to have it all packed up but were only just halfway ready when moving day arrived (blame the baby). So I took baby out of the house while my husband frantically threw things in boxes and the movers loaded it all up.
They drove the truck to our new house, and we met them there to unload everything, directing them where to put what. In one long day, we’d moved. It was chaotic and everything was in shambles, and we had to immediately go out and buy blackout curtains for the baby’s room. But it was done! Sort of.
The movers and my husband forgot to check the cupboards in the kitchen. Everything was still there, even the food in the fridge. So we had to make several trips in our Honda CRV to load up the kitchen things. Lesson learned. Luckily, we were planning to keep our small house and turn it into a rental, so we didn’t have the usual pressure of needing to be out by a certain day, and we had time to piecemeal pack up the rest of our things and move.
Total time from leaving our small house to moving into our big house: 2 weeks
The Midwest to England move, circa 2025
This will be the big kahuna, the most stuff, the most logistics, the most people, the most everything. Hopefully we’ve learned a few things along the way so it can also be the most stress-free, the most exciting, the most fun. Hopefully!
