Moving is Hard

Hey, look! A blog post! The first one in almost a month. "What the heck, you slackers!"

The short and long of it is this: We have been moving. And not just moving in the "they delivered our stuff and now we have to unpack" sense. No no no. This is "I'm too old to be doing all this stuff" moving. Let's back up...

When we left Austin, we split our stuff into 3 moving piles. Pile 1 (the smallest) was stuff that we were taking on the plane. What we needed for the first 2 to 3 weeks over here. Mostly summer clothes with a few warmer things. Meds. Toiletries. Think "packing for a long trip on steroids". We each checked two suitcases and had a carry-on. So, a bit of stuff. Pile 1 (obviously) went to our temporary apartment with us.

Pile 2 was a little bigger and was shipped via air freight. It arrived in about 2 weeks. There were more clothes and a few other things (my desktop computer with all my financial stuff on it, for instance). This pile was also shipped to the temporary place.

Pile 3 was everything else. This is what you would think of as the stuff in the moving truck. Pile 3 was shipped via ... ship ... and was delivered straight to our new permanent place.

So, we picked a move-in date of August 20th for our stuff to arrive at the new place. However, before this, we had some ... prep work to do. We started moving over a few of the things from the temporary apartment, but that wasn't the big time sink. Nope. The big time sink was Ikea. When you move into a place in Germany, you never know what you are going to get. Some places don't even come with a kitchen. As in, no cabinets, no stove, no oven, nothing. This is becoming rarer, but it does still happen. Our place DID have a kitchen, but it did NOT have closets. I mean, there is a small coat closet on the ground floor and a cleaning closet and a pantry, but that is it. No closets in the bedrooms and no linen closet.

Enter Ikea. The week before our move-in date, the boxes began to arrive. There was one LARGE delivery and a bunch of small Amazon deliveries. The weekend before our stuff arrived, it was time to assemble. And assemble we did. The master had a dressing room which now has an entire wall of shelves and rods. The guest room got a small wardrobe. The office needed a desk and a bookshelf and the bathroom got a set of drawers and a small standup linen closet. Whee! So, THAT was the weekend of August 18-19.

(Lesson 1 of German houses: Be prepared to buy / assemble some furnishings)

On August 20th, our furniture arrives and after some panic about getting the couch in the house (it ended up making in through a window), we now have all our stuff! Except we don't. There is still a bunch of stuff (see piles 1 and 2 above) still over at the apartment. The weekend of the 25th/26th was filled with moving the rest of our stuff over and unpacking the new place.

Remember how happy I was about there being a kitchen? Well, that is offset (slightly) by the fact that there were no light fixtures. That's right! No light fixtures. And not only no light fixtures, no boxes in the ceiling into which to mount them. They just leave wires hanging out of the ceiling. After a $130 purchase of a hammer drill (since the ceilings are all concrete) I spent time scattered here and there hanging lights. There were 9 in all to hang, and the last 7 took all of last Saturday (Sept. 1st) to finish.

(Lesson 2 of German houses: Be prepared to buy / install other necessities)

Now that we are moved in, we can start to figure out the other oddities. For instance, there is a washer, but no dryer. Dryers are not as ubiquitous here as in the states. We have been hanging our clothes since we got here, but a dryer may have to be purchased at some point as it takes a couple of days for jeans to dry. There is also the fact that this place has a furnace and radiators, something I have never dealt with before. It took some poking around to find the English-language version of the instruction manual for the boiler controller.

So, there ya go. Not a very exciting post, but now we are settled and that means we are a) ready for visitors and b) ready to go out and have more adventures!

After we rest. Because, I'm still too old for all of this moving. Also, I used the word "stuff" a lot in this post. I'm too fragged to use another word, to be honest. :)