Moving Things

Our packers are coming 4 1/2 days. At Tech School hubby would call that 3 days and a wake up. In any case, it's coming up on us really soon. For those of you that have never done a military move, let me fill you in on how this works.

There are many preparations leading up to moving, some of which include briefings. Many briefings. After you have been briefed (did I mention many times?) they schedule your move for you. For the most part you can pick out the days that you want the movers to come, unless you are moving in a busy season. Then you take whatever you can get! Fortunately we're moving at the very beginning of the busy season so we got the dates that we asked for!

Apparently we have now accumulated enough junk property that we now qualify for 2 days of the packers being here. So, on Wednesday, the packers will show up and start boxing up our things. Now, to some of you, this may sound wonderful because we don't have to pack everything ourselves. And there is definitely that benefit. However, we also have to watch to be sure that they are not being careless and that they are labeling everything correctly on the outside of the box. While we have never had a problem with loosing a box, there are (of course) many horror stories out there. But I'm not concentrating on those stories right now, so let's move on.

Our packers will pack everything on Wednesday and Thursday. The older children will be at friends houses who were suckered into nice enough to watch them for us. We'll keep the baby with us since she would only scream for friends. As a bribe to be nice with our things we buy the packers lunch both days. We also provide drinks for them.

On Friday the movers will come and load everything into a truck. This is the part that can be nerve wracking at times. There are some items of furniture that I choose not to watch be carried out of the house. And with the new full replacement value insurance that the AF pays for I'm a little more relaxed about them breaking my things! We will also provide food and drinks for the movers. In general the movers have always been very nice. The thing to watch with this part is their notes on our things. For every piece of furniture that they move they put a numbered sticker on it for tracking purposes. Then next to that number they make notes on the inventory. These notes are hard to decipher (read:horrible handwriting) but have to be looked over to be sure that they didn't mark down something horrible for your furniture. They may mark "stained" or "soiled" on something that looks practically brand new. Again, we've never had any problems, but the horror stories are out there. You may be asking what the big deal is. If the inventory says that there is a gash or stain, but there wasn't, then it arrives with something wrong, then it'll be really hard to get that replaced because "it wasn't the movers who did it". Again, we've never had any problems....

After everything is out of here we'll start the cleaning process. We live in a base housing unit so it has to be very clean when we leave. White glove clean. The trick is that we'll also still be living here at the time (we'll be sleeping on air mattresses). We'll clean here on Friday, Saturday and Monday. We'll stay Monday night at a friends house then our final inspection is Tuesday morning. Whatever we didn't get clean or is broken will be deducted from our BAH (Basic Housing Allowance). So we'll be sure to do a good job of cleaning :-)

After that we'll be on our way! We check into our new base a week later (after visiting friends and family along the way) and will hopefully move into housing shortly thereafter. We'll buy pizza for our movers on that end too. It's only fair :-)