The Big Move - Shipping Containers and Packing Tape

I have to say that it feels like we move A LOT. In the last 14 years, we've moved 7 times. Sure, sometimes we just moved within the same city, but other times we moved fairly substantial distances. This time has been our biggest adventure. We've packed a lot of moving boxes in our time and we've also packed a lot of moving vans, but this was pretty epic. We packed our very first shipping container.

Yeah, one of those things you see on truck commercials and espionage movies. Ours was a fairly diminutive 20 feet, but when it's delivered, they don't take it off the back of the truck bed, which is four feet off the ground, then add the extra 6 inches of so depth of the container and, well it's pretty darned high up. Thank heaven's for the Leon's Furniture guys, who helped get the big stuff up from their delivery truck (& they even helped with some non-Leon's stuff), which was a fantastic thing, as we might have been hooped otherwise.

The container was dropped off at 9 am and by 3 pm, it looked like this. 

There is an art to packing a shipping container, you do not want anything to shift. This means that every box (and other items) needs to have something wodged on all sides. What you see above is a carefully orchestrated "cascade" style pack, where the big things are in the back and the smaller things are packed towards the front, bolstered by the 4x8 and a 2x4. We have said a fairly deep and meaningful prayer over the pack job and have sent our things on their way. We hope that our efforts will pay off and everything will arrive safely at its destination

Ron's been diligent about keeping an eye on the weather, so we wrapped all our furniture on a random sunny Sunday (imagine that!) and on Monday it snowed of all things. Our container packing day was cold, with a bitter wind, but thankfully no snow or rain. (I had to wear two pairs of pants to keep warm!) Once the work was done and the container was on it's way to port, the sun came out (of course!).

So Ron and I are taking five, soaking up some rays and resting our very tired bodies.

Keep your fingers crossed for us! We'll let you know how it all works out in 6-8 weeks!