Our Stuff Arrives

Almost 7 weeks after our stuff was picked up in Los Angeles on November 9th, it arrived in London on Dec 23rd. The container that everything was transfered into in Long Beach Harbor pulled up to our flat in London at 10:30am.

There was some drama in that the bolt used to seal the doors had been bent in transit, which made it difficult to use the bolt cutters to unseal the container. After some work, the bolt was finally removed, and the container opened. It was very exciting as the container doors were opened for the first time since it was sealed approximately 5 weeks earlier.

We had 3 guys from the Shipping company on the UK side to help haul all of our furniture up the 3 floors to our apartment. There were so many boxes. As quickly as the boxes of furniture came in, I worked to unbox and unwrap. It sprinkled rain off and on while the furniture was unloaded, so we had to unload items in batches. This was good in that if we had to bring everything into the apartment before unboxing, we'd have never been able to move inside the apartment. We kept equating the unpacking as a game of Tetris, where you had to move a box over, step around it, move the box to unpack, and then carefully remove the box from the apartment. The rooms were filled from floor to ceiling. Even now, there are still boxes we have yet to unpack.

The shipping company did ship all of our US food, so we should be pretty good for the next while with "good" American Food.

It appears that only a couple items were damaged in the shipping. The one framed movie poster, Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, had it's glass broken. Also, our steel fliptop kitchen trashcan was dented. All and all, we felt very lucky. I also ended up paying almost $1000 in insurance, so we should be covered. The biggest challenge now is finding places for everything and getting the apartment in some sort of order in time for Christmas in 2 days. YIKES!