When we first moved overseas from America in 2018, my contract included shipping a container to our new home and putting the rest of our belongings in storage in the U.S. At the time, we anticipated being overseas for just a couple of years and weren’t sure where life would take us. We had a moving company come and pack everything up for us. I remember we had separated out items in the garage that we didn’t think we would need in Lesotho—our 110-voltage lamps, our queen guest mattress, a sleeper sofa, and our favorite collection of coffee mugs. What else is in there? Honestly, I don’t remember.
With our recent move to Germany and my contract finishing in Africa, we had a choice: ship our stored items to a U.S. address or pay the difference to ship them here to Germany. We no longer have a home base in the U.S., so we would have had to pay for a storage unit. When we did the math, we realized that one year’s worth of storage would equal the cost of shipping, so we decided to just go for it and have everything sent here. For several reasons, it wasn’t an option to go through the storage unit and weed out unnecessary things, so we just had the entire storage unit shipped.
Our house here is much smaller than our home in Tanzania, and it’s mostly already furnished, so we were nervous about receiving all of our stuff. Where would it all go? Luckily, we have a large basement that we weren’t using, but getting it ready for our things was a lot of work. My husband had to clear out several rooms filled with old items, my in-laws helped clean and get the walls ready and haul away a lot of junk. But we managed to have a space ready to hold the incoming items from America just in time.
Receiving items you haven’t seen in seven years was like a really strange Christmas—fun to see things we’ve missed, but also full of surprises. It has been a humbling experience to realize what we actually need and that we’ve managed to live without all of this for so long. Since we moved with tiny kids, the boxes contained all our belongings from before they were born. We still have a lot of boxes to open, and I know there will be a pile of unusable 110v electronics, but we did find some fun things. Dominik had forgotten he had some golf clubs in storage, and I forgot I had my bike there (don’t ask me how many bikes I now own!). I’m excited to get my hands on our framed wedding photos and our favorite coffee mug collection, but mostly I am glad that all of our stuff is finally in one place.
While we don’t intend to live in this house full-time beyond a couple of years, it will always be our home base (more on this house in another post). And we definitely don’t intend on moving with this much stuff again. I don’t think I’m a “move with only suitcases” kind of gal, but figuring out what we truly need sounds like a great project for the next year.
