Monday 2 July 2012

Shipping: Complete.

The shipping is now complete, they have been and gone!

It was pretty much a painless process (apart from all the cleaning)!

Two guys from PSS turned up about 9am (they'd gotten stuck in traffic) in a van, the kind that you'd use for moving house. We had a quick chat and I showed them around the house and pointed out what to take and what not to.

Its worth mentioning here that you need to do a little bit of prep before they turn up (I didn't read the paper work until the night before!). What they suggest is to move anything that you don't want to take, into another room completely. So I had a mad rush removing things that were staying, elsewhere. It wasn't possible/practical to move everything, but I made it clear by separating things out as best I could.

Also (as I think I have mentioned before) anything that has been near the outdoors, like shoes, tents, kids toys etc needs to be thoroughly clean and disinfected. I'd only cleaned the dirty looking shoes, so after reading the paper work I realised I'd better do all of them! So scrubbing shoes at 7 am it was. Fun.

Anything that can be flat packed needs to be done in advance of their arrival. So I had to make sure I was up early to take the bed apart (I wanted to enjoy one last night of sleep in it). We have two coffee tables, which I didn't flat pack at first, because I thought they would just stack things on and through them. So I check with the guys and they agreed that they do, do that. But when I saw them them later they were wrapping the tables up in card board as if they were a big empty box, with nothing in between them. And as the price is based on volume, I wasn't too keen on this. So I queried it, and then flat packed the other table to keep the cost down. So be careful and flat pack everything!

Once I'd shown them what to take, they brought in a load of flat boxes and packing equipment. They took a room each, then made and loaded the boxes as they went, combining two boxes if one wasn't big enough. In the mean time I printed out the Declaration of Cleanliness form that was emailed to me, and filled it out, saying what items I had cleaned and what disinfectant I had used. Which by the way was Trigene as used by vets and tattoo studios apparently.

When done, they had an itemised list which they had filled out as they went along and I signed to confirm it was all correct, as well as a short survey about the service. They seemed very efficient and all in all it took about just over 4 hours. So that left me with the rest of the day to vacuum and clean up the bare rooms!

It takes 8-10 weeks door to door, so hopefully we'll see all of our stuff within a few months, I'll keep you posted!



Oh and just a quick update on other stuff, very last minute, I have agreed to stay on at my work for another three months!!! My work's plans on moving everything to India isn't quite going to plan, so they were keen to keep people on for longer. It wasn't an easy decision, but Sarah and I agreed that it would probably be for the best, so at least we still have one wage coming in, and hopefully she can find work in that time. Unfortunately it means I won't have seen them for 4 months by the time I get out there. At least there is Skype.

If I had kept my flight, I would have arrived there this morning and already have enjoyed their company. Never mind, back to my empty room instead!