Extreme Couponing: Foreign Service Edition

Many of you will remember our seeing pictures of our piles and piles of stuff waiting to be packed up so we could move to China. Well, all that "stuff" has finally arrived. After three, almost four weeks of delays, our Household Effects finally made to us.

The night before our stuff was to be delivered, PM and I were saying that we don't even know what all is in the boxes and we really hope we don't have boxes of stuff sitting around our entire time in China because we have no place to put the stuff. I watched it all get taken away in DC, but I still didn't know what it would look like when it got here. If it was a lot more, less, or the same, as what I remember.

Around 9:00 am, I got a phone call that the truck was downstairs and ready to be unloaded. I was to go down to certify that our wooden shipping crate hadn't been opened since the US (very unlikely that is true as our stuff has to pass through customs), but I was excited to see just how big the crate was.

Our crate of stuff. Exciting!

PM was busy with projects at work, so he didn't want to take the day off to help get all of our stuff, so I tackled it by myself. The movers here were awesome. They hauled everything inside and as they were bringing boxes into the apartment, I was given a sheet to check to make sure all the boxes arrived. I commented part way through that half the boxes were labeled "wine glasses", which I found funny as we don't own that many wine glasses. Either the movers in D.C. packed them one per box or they were just not very creative in their labeling. 

Once all the boxes were in, we noticed that we had two #13s, two #26s, one unmarked box, and no #25 box. Hmmm.... either someone in D.C. can't count or something wasn't right here! I decided not to have the movers unpack each and every box and put things away because I didn't know where anything was going to go and in case I didn't have it all done by Saturday when people were coming over, I would rather have boxes sitting around than piles of stuff. The movers left and I was left to figure out what was going on with our double numbers and missing box and such.

All the boxes piled up in the spare bedroom.

I decided to start by assessing the boxes to see what was what. While doing so, I noticed some of the labeling on them was interesting. A special prize to anyone who can decipher what "Kitchen: Food spaoy" is!

By the end of delivery day, I had conquered most of the boxes and moved stuff to the rooms I thought it would go to. PM came home to quite the organized mess and piles of boxes.

By the end of day two, everything was all put away and mostly organized. I think we have one box left unopened of summer clothes that we aren't wearing now, but other than that, everything is in its place. The thing that took the longest to organize was our consumables. Guangzhou isn't a post that gives you an extra consumables shipment as you really can buy everything here. However, we were warned that certain things were expensive and of poor quality, and since we had lots of leftover weight, we decided to ship our own. I now feel like we are on Extreme Couponing as we have a toiletries store in our house. But don't worry, if you come to visit, we got you covered on shampoo, conditioner, mouthwash, and almost everything else!

Remember how we were missing box #25. Well, after opening all the others (which were all our stuff), we discovered several items were missing, and I must assume they are in that box. The funny part is, despite half our boxes being labeled "wine glasses", what are we missing? All of our red wine glasses! We are in the process of trying to locate that box, otherwise, I guess we will head out and buy some new ones as a house isn't a home without wine glasses.