As is customary for Fullers, we set this up to have the most complex and challenging packing situation imaginable.
The idea was/is that we moved out of our house on March 21st and had renters moving in on April 1st. The kids don’t need to be in London school until September (the London school did not think that finishing US 3rd and 5th grade would be very relevant), so, we basically have between March 21st and early September to travel as a family without paying rent anywhere. That sounds pretty great and in many ways it is. However, it also presents a few challenges – the first of which was how to pack.
There are variety of packing scenarios one might find themselves in that offer varying degrees of challenge:
- A vacation
- A long vacation
- A long and open-ended vacation without preset destinations
- A long and open-ended vacation without preset destinations that will likely involve multiple climates
Moving is usually unrelated to packing for a vacation and is always a challenge. It also comes in a few flavors:
- Moving locally
- Moving long distance
- Moving long distance to a new country
- Moving long distance to a new country prior to having a new place to live
- Moving long distance to a new country prior to having a new place to live, not knowing if you might come back in a year or if it might be more like 10 years
Because we like to challenge ourselves we combined the most difficult versions of both things:
Moving long distance to a new country prior to having a new place to live, not knowing if we might come back in a year or if it might be more like 10 years + A long and open-ended vacation without preset destinations that will likely involve multiple climates prior to having a new place to live
We like to think of ourselves as highly capable people, but this was NOT easy. There were many categories to work through:
a) Travel bags: Some stuff was packed to be used for ongoing travel – roller boards with about a week’s worth of clothes initially geared towards UK spring time weather.
b) London storage: Some stuff was packed into large duffle bags that we brought with us on the flight as checked baggage and put into storage once we landed. This was meant to be all of the stuff we would bring to move into our future London house. It was somewhat sorted to enable us to make periodic resupply runs to our storage facility in London to change things out – e.g., exchange coats for shorts as the weather gets warmer. Most of this was vacuum packed which is surprisingly effective and easy to do. Aside from choosing what to bring, the tricky part here was that we need to be able to carry it through 2 airports, customs, and get it from Heathrow to a storage facility in London.
This is where it now lives in London storage
c) Stuff we couldn’t bring with us on our initial flights out to London, but might want later: Ski clothes, camping gear, stuff like that.
d) Stuff that will go into storage in Seattle: This was particularly hard since there are many things that we would want if we returned to Seattle in a year, but certainly would not want to pay for storage for 5+ years. And, of course if we decide in a year that we want to stay for a long time, it leaves us with two bad options:
- Continuing to pay a lot to store stuff we probably won’t ever want again OR
- Flying to Seattle and unloading a bunch of storage vaults in a parking lot somewhere in order to sort through it and figure out how to donate/sell/throw-away/etc. all of it.
e) Stuff to donate, sell, throw away or otherwise get ride of: Very complicated due to the undecided timeline.
In the end, we donated A LOT of stuff. I suspect a healthy chunk of the inventory at the Redmond Goodwill is from our house, but there was still tons of stuff in all the other categories as well. We even rented an enormous car to help – and I’ve gotta say that the Ford Expedition is actually pretty great.
We worked very hard in the days leading up to the move both physically and mentally. It was quite a relief to finally be done and on our way to the airport. Time will tell how good of a job we did…
