During World War II an organization called Bundles for Britain sent non-military supplies including knitted sweaters, scarves, and hats to the UK from the US. Seventy-five years later we have our own version, right down to the knitting, going on with the arrival of our household goods from Atlanta via Southampton, England.

In the blog post Holiday home for home there’s a picture of what our original shipment looked like as it awaited pickup from our house that we had just sold that day. Happily it looked exactly the same when it arrived at our front door after traveling 4500 miles/7200 kilometers via truck, ship, and train. A local company completed the delivery here with a friendly, skillful driver who must have had lots of experience threading his big truck through the narrow streets of Carcassonne.

In that blog post mentioned above, I talked about Bill being a good puzzle solver as far as how to get all of those 50-some individual boxes balanced, packed, and strapped together so that our shipment was one cohesive unit. Now he gets to use those talents in reverse in trying to find places to store everything that’s in all of those cartons. Luckily the house came equipped with some purpose-built storage such as for the crystal you see in the photo. I don’t think the owners had in mind a machine-knitting studio for the tiny second bedroom but that’s exactly what it’s going to become. Those bunk beds look to me to be the perfect spot to stack a bunch of yarn; like 6 big boxes of it!

In case you’re thinking about sending some household goods overseas, here are a few details from our experience. The shipping company we used sent us a wooden pallet upon which we stacked all of the moving boxes we bought from a home improvement store. With strapping tape Bill wrapped layers together so that it was one solid unit 4 feet by 4 feet by 6 feet tall that we wrapped in the cardboard and plastic they sent plus more tape to hold everything in place. The total shipping cost was $3000 of which $600 was for full replacement value insurance. It took 10 weeks to the day from pick up at our house in Atlanta to drop off at our front door in Carcassonne.