Oh, the work we did!

When we got back to CA, and recovered from the jet lag, we started to work in earnest to get back to Germany. People asked “Oh, was the relocation service good to work with?” There was no relocation service!! Logan’s boss said “Go to Germany”. We did everything ourselves.

We started a list of the projects to do in the house, like get the kitchen floor replaced, and fix the ‘oops’ step as you come in the front door. The list grew every day for about a week, even as we were knocking items off. So much to do!

We knew we wanted to rent out our house. We thought that we’d prefer to rent it furnished. So in late March, I started going through the stuff, to get rid of things that were just hanging around because they had a place. I soon realized that I buy, and hang on to, way too much stuff! Of course, some was the result of 18+ years of being in California, with 12 in the house on Springer Ave. The house was rarely cluttered, it has so much storage space. But the storage space sure was full. I took 4 pick-up truck loads of clothes and miscellaneous goods to Good Will. We took over 700 books to the Book Go Round which supports the Saratoga Library. We had Salvation Army come and take some old furniture – it was old, beat up, but still useful and it had a place so we kept it.

We rented a personal storage space up the road, and packed up and stowed away our personal items like the books we still wanted to keep, the small amount of high-school memorabilia, the Christmas decorations, etc. Filled up a 7 x 10 space with no problem.

Along about the first week of April, we got recommendations from Nancy, our excellent realtor, about property managers in the area. We talked with three, and chose Donna of JDS Property Managers. She said that she only deals in unfurnished places. In our area, to get someone on a year lease, they typically want to move their stuff in. (Unlike, Germany, where renting is more typical than buying. And fortunately, there are a few places here for rent that are furnished.)

Soooo, now we need to find someone to pack & store the rest of our stuff. Started asking around, got recommendations and had 5 people over to the house over the next couple weeks to look at our stuff and provide an estimate.

Logan was also working on finding a way to get our bikes, our clothes and his car over to Germany. We ended up with a different service for each.

Donna came over to the house, we signed the contract with her, and she took some pictures. She posted the house on Craig’s list on Monday May 2nd, got three responses that day. We had 2 couples come over & look at the place on Tuesday. One was coming into the area from Connecticut, he has a job with Google; the other family is from Tokyo, he works for Fujitsu. The Japanese couple was already living in the neighborhood just a couple blocks over, but their landlord wanted to sell the house to they needed to find a new rental.

Saturday the 7th, the Kuratas signed the rental contract, to start on June 1st. Yay! That’s one big thing out of the way.

On Monday May 9th we drove his car up to the Port of Oakland, where they were going to put it into a container & load it on a ship. It was supposed to ship out May 12th, but the shipment didn’t clear customs quickly enough so it shipped on the 26th.

The evenings of the 9th, 10th and 11th, I went to a going-away party each evening. It is all starting to sink in that it’s going to be the last time I see some of my dear friends for a while. What the heck am I doing?

We had visions of just loafing around our last week in California, but it turned out to be the hardest work of all. We spent Saturday and Sunday packing the suitcases we were going to take on the plane and segregating the stuff we wanted to ship to Germany in one area, as the movers were coming on Monday the 16th to pack the rest of our things for storage. Once we got our ‘ship to Munich’ stuff in one place, we started packing it.

May 16, Monday. The movers showed up this morning; Severin and Kenny. Thank god for strong 23 year-olds. They worked from 8 until about 2 packing. We continued to pack through the evening; I was working on clothing and Logan started breaking down the bikes to pack them. We got to our hotel around 10 that night; we stayed at the Saratoga Oaks Lodge, about 5 blocks from our house. Weird staying in a hotel that close to home, but O My it was wonderful to get to that quiet, furnished room with no chores waiting in it!

May 17, Tuesday. Severin and Kenny showed up again at 8, and they brought along Dave and Gerrel. They continued to pack and started hauling stuff into the driveway to load onto the truck. It still took them until about 2 to finish. The last thing they packed was the big dragon by the front door. They crafted a custom box out of a couple big ones, wrapped him in bubble wrap, and used up the 3 bags of styrofoam peanuts that we had been collecting in the basement. Yay! Dragon packed, and another chore finished. (I was going to have to take the peanuts to UPS for reuse, otherwise.)

Logan finished up packing the bikes, all 4 of them. (My bike, his road bike, his mountain bike, and his cross country bike) He had purchased 2 shipping crates for his mountain and road bikes, and got 2 shipping boxes from the local bike store for the other two. Made a final run to Goodwill, as I was setting aside clothes to either store or ship I made some hard choices and tossed out more stuff. I then headed back to the hotel to get cleaned up and met a friend for drinks at The Basin, one block from the hotel. Logan joined us later and we had dinner there.

May 18, Wednesday. We slept in and went over to the house a little later in the morning. Finished packing up the clothes. I headed off to my last Entrepreneurial class; I’ve been a volunteer couch at the Girls’ Middle School for their 7th-grade Entrepreneurial class, and this day we reconciled and cashed out. My team did a pretty good job tracking their expenses and their sales, and they made a profit of more than $500!

Wednesday evening, we did the final walkthrough of the house with our tenants. Then we drove the rental car and Logan’s truck up the hill to Kristen’s house, as she and Rick were buying the truck. It was a rainy, foggy night and I really didn’t want to be driving the rental minivan up 17, but this chore had to get done. Took along all the booze I hadn’t managed to get rid of and some stuff from the kitchen.

May 19, Thursday. Logan broke down all the boxes that we had been collecting that we hadn’t used. (old Xerox paper boxes, etc.) We collected all the trash – and there was quite a bit of it, and called for a special pickup for Friday. Took the final load to the storage space, including the phone. I got the call about my car pick-up around 1:00. Oh yeah, did I mention that I sold my car in the middle of all this? I had wanted to keep it but got convinced that it just would not do well in storage for 2 or more years. So I offered it to my brother, who had always said he wanted it when I was done with it. Zoomed back to the Lodge, and handed my car over to the drive of the Dependable Auto Shipping truck.

That evening, we met 2 friends for a movie (The Interpreter). Logan and I ended up for dinner at Willow Street in Westgate. Headed off to bed early, as by now we’re so tired we can’t really think straight.

Friday morning we had breakfast at Holders, for some ‘pancake therapy’. We called about the flight, and discovered that it was pushed back from 9:30 p.m. departure to 11:00 p.m. departure. Logan had an errand to do, and went to do that. He got back to the hotel and we finished up the last bit of food we’d had in the mini fridge. I had to pick up one final bit of vitamins at the doctor, so we got all the suitcases into the minivan, and headed up to Palo Alto. Got there around 3:30, and since we had time we stopped at the movie theater to see if there was something playing at 5. There wasn’t, so we headed into downtown PA, walked around a bit, and had dinner at the Empire Tap Room. Then we walked back to the minivan by way of Borders and picked up some books to read on the plane.