Packing Day!

Check out what happened at our place last week...

Yup, it's all gone! 

Over two days I watched everything in our home get padded, boxed, and loaded into a truck. Five guys moved from room to room like a high speed train with no brakes in a dizzying blur of brown paper, bubble wrap, and squeaky packing tape, leaving us with an eerily cleared out home and a few rejected items that they couldn't put in the shipment for customs reasons. Mostly opened food stuff in the kitchen, my partner's recurve bow and practice arrows (falls under the prohibited section as "weapons"), our plants (obviously), and aerosol cans. 

We were given two household goods (HHG) shipments: a sea shipment (est. arrival in Mumbai is 6-8 wks and 4-5 business days to clear customs), and an air shipment (est. arrival 2-3 wks + 2-3 business days at customs) which I only found out about the day before the movers came.  I've heard varying experiences and opinions about how long it'll be before we see our things again so am interested to see where ours will fit in. Honestly, I think I really didn't make the best use of the air shipment and I have a feeling that we'll be living in an empty apartment for a while.  We'll see about all that.

With our stuff gone, we're spending the last 2.5 weeks in a hotel near my partner's office. Seeing our empty place as we cleaned it for the last time was a little sad, but I'm happy that all the obsessive organizing and hyper-planned packing for 8-10 weeks of necessities is done. 

Stella standing where our couch used to be

And, my favorite thing about all this is I can finally say goodbye to the UGLIEST KITCHEN EVER! Bye bye hideous fake marble linoleum floor, overhead fluorescent light, and ancient always-sticky kitchen cabinets!!!! WON'T be missing you!