One of the complicating factors for the impending international move is that it turns out that Chris and I have a lot stuff. A. Lot. Of. Stuff. It’s not a big deal in Maryland, because in our Maryland house we have a lot of square footage and a ton of storage. The basic stats of the Maryland house aren’t that impressive: 3 bedroom, 2 bath, a living room, kitchen, and large sun room. But, once we got the basement finished in 2021, we suddenly gained a large laundry space and 1,000 sq ft of living space, which we promptly filled up. On top of that, we have a 2 car garage and an additional 400 sq ft heated/cooled workshop, which means that we also have a lot of storage for even more stuff.
As of 5 months before the move, we have 3 full sets of furniture for a living room (in our current living room, sun room, and basement), 3 full size dining room tables and chairs (one in the sun room, two in the basement), 2 regular sized desks (one for the computer and one for my sewing machine), 1 double-sized desk (for Chris’ painting/hobby space), and of course all of the other random bits and pieces adults seem to acquire when they have random space that needs to be filled.
We are also of course collectors of things - lego kits, board games, baking supplies, fabric for quilting, photography/video equipment, miniature painting supplies, and a whole lot more.
So: what are we going to do with all that stuff?!?
As with literally everything else that goes into the moving process, the answer is: it’s complicated.
Since the government is paying for the move and the government knows that most people don’t want to bring all their stuff with them the government will store a certain amount of our household goods. The catch though is that the government storage isn’t temperature controlled, which means anything that goes into that storage will likely come out moldy. We have also been warned by numerous other people who have gone through this process, that most of the broken/destroyed things from the move came from the government storage part of their household goods, which kind of sucks. Therefore, our current plan is to divide our belongings into several categories:
Get rid of things we don’t need/want anymore
Use government storage for things we don’t care that much about or can easily replace
Pay for temperature-controlled self-storage for all the things we actually care about but probably won't need in Germany
Only move things we need to Germany
When we first started talking about this move, our original thought process was that we would get rid of around 10%, put about 20% in government storage, put about 50% in temperature control storage on our dime, and take about 20% with us. However, since then we have started evaluating our furniture and the other things we own, and we’re starting to think that we will get rid of a lot more than we originally planned and try to limit how much goes into storage — but at this point we’re really not sure what will go where.
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