FINALLY HOME!!

Ah the joys of military moves! The German company that was scheduled to deliver our things called last week to ask about the parking situation and to confirm their scheduled arrival time at 8:00am. In the US the arrival time of military movers is flexible at best – but we didn’t know what to expect here in Deutschland. Turns out, it’s not so different….

We got to the apartment at 730am and emptied car load number two. Then we ran around contemplating paint chips in the daylight. I had NO IDEA that picking paint colors was so difficult. I could describe the shade and colors I wanted for each room – but too many options made selecting the actual color overwhelming! When the movers finally arrived (at 930) we also held the chips up to furniture and to the bedspread. That helped a bit.

Our shipment took a bit of a circuitous route to our apartment. In a perfect world, our furniture would have been loaded from our Norfolk home directly into large shipping crates on the truck. The crates would have been sealed up and then transferred to a ship and delivered to us in Stuttgart unopened (assuming customs didn’t need to see our furniture). However, our move was hung up by a paperwork item in Norfolk.  So, our stuff was instead loaded on to the truck, sans crates, and then unloaded at a storage area.  Six weeks later (due to yet another paperwork glitch) it was loaded into crates and forwarded to Germany. This meant that our stuff was handled by movers a total of FOUR times, instead of twice. Of course, every time our posessions are handled is another opportunity for damage and loss. Judging by the way our stuff came off of the truck – we think it must have been handled about seventeen times…..

We had a total of seven crates worth of household goods. The movers were nice and spoke very little English. I had prepared the empty apartment in advance by taping a number to the door of each room. I figured I know my numbers in German better than I know the names for “living room” and “guest room”. When the movers needed direction as to where to put items, it worked pretty well to give the number in German (although it turns out that pointing works pretty well also!)

Our furniture is pretty beat up. Hubbz dresser came without one of its legs (we later found it in one of the drawers - um...thanks??). There are chunks missing from the legs of our bed and sofas. The entire shipment looks pretty much like someone threw rocks at it (my friend B says that perhaps it was used as a shield from pirate attacks)! Our kitchen table (which is about as old as we are and not a piece of quality furniture by any measure) showed up in the first crate – with only three legs. The fourth leg showed up in the seventh crate. (We were honestly kinda bummed, because we are ready to buy a new table and the replacement money would have helped!)

Three truck loads later, all of our belongings were off of the truck…and piled in the center of each room so the painter could begin work on the next day. Hubbz had an evening conference call at work, so I dropped him off on base, and went back to the hotel to pack up the clothes – our last load of items to be moved into our new apartment. We turned in at 11:00, tired from the day’s adventure, excited about settling into the new place, and even a bit wistful about leaving the hotel which was our first German home! We chuckled at the realization that while we felt like our German life had been “on hold” for three months – we had already created a lot of memories of our time here :)