3 Categories

Receiving overseas orders means that everything you own has to be sorted into one of 3 categories:

1.  Household Goods-this is the big shipment of your things that will be shipped to the country you are moving to.  In our case the government would pay to move about half our things over to Korea.  This is the biggest shipment, but it takes the most time to get there-usually at least 3 months.

2.  Express-this is a much smaller shipment of things that are also going to the country you are moving too.  It can be around 1000 lbs of things you use on a daily basis (pots and pans, towels, dishes, microwave, sheets, Russ' uniforms, etc).  This shipment will get there much faster-usually around a month.

3.  Storage-in order to save some money in moving costs, the government will only let you take about half of your things with you on overseas orders.  Then they will allow you to use some loaner furniture while you are there.   So a lot of times you end up putting a lot of your big furniture/items into long term storage. 

Sorting everything in your house into one of these 3 categories is an overwhelming and exhausting process.  I always use this time as a time to do a huge clean-out of our our things and purge the things we don't need.  My feeling is, besides furniture, "if we can store it for 3 years and not miss it, we probably don't need it".  

It works best for us, if we set aside one room for "household goods" and one room for "express".  This time it was our dining room for household good and the sun room for express.  Every time I went through an area of the house I would move everything that was going into one of those areas.  That way when the packers come, I just tell them to pack everything in that area to go to Korea.  It is a ton of work for me, but it is an easy way to not get our stuff mixed up.  Once things are packed you can't go back and unpack it.

The sun room became our "express room".  If it was going in the express shipment it had to be in the sun room.  The girls had a really hard time remembering not to move things out of the sun room.  If they took something out to use it, they had to remember to put it back.  Like I said, once it gets packed (or not packed) you can't go back and change it.

For about a month before we moved my dining room slowly started to accumulate items in it that were going to be shipped to Korea.  About 2 weeks before we left it looked like this:

About a week before we left the dining room looked like this:

And the day the movers came I guess I didn't take a picture of it, but it was so full you could barely even walk in it.  When the movers come they always freak, because it is so much stuff in one room to be packed, but they quickly realize how easy the job is for them.  They don't have to leave that room, just stand there and pack everything in it.  And there are no questions about what should go and what should stay, it is all right there.

Here are some larger things that were getting packed in the household good shipment:

The storage furniture and heavy stuff all got shoved into one part of our living room.

Moving, no matter where to, is a lot of work (I should know I have done it over 10 times).  But moving to a foreign country takes the amount of work to a whole new level.  For us, it is a family project.  We all work together to get ready for the move, we view it as just another "Pound Family Adventure".