Anyone who has lived in Europe has probably run into the the discussion of furnished, unfurnished, and soft furnished housing. But if you are coming directly from the US or Canada, this is a shocker. Here is a little comparison for you.
When you move into an unfurnished place you have to add the cost of “furnishings” to your budget and the time to have them installed. And whatever you put in, you take out when you move. It seems short sighted, but no one asked me.
In theory, the hope was that we would get a furnished (by US standards) house, but these have proven to be hard to find. So instead, we have chosen a “soft” furnished house. The soft furnished picture above is from our new house, looking at the main living area and kitchen.
Since we were not able to find a furnished house, we have the option to ship our household contents in a container by sea. While our new place is not small, by local standards, it is half the size of our current house. So not only would we have to decide what to ship and what to store in Houston, but then we would also have to cross our fingers and hope we could get it in the house once it arrives.
I am not interested in that game, so we are storing our furniture and only packing personal items. That means we will be going over with up to three checked bags each and two air freight containers like the two below.
Together, we have up to 156 ft3 of space and up to 875 lb/397 kg of weight. They assure me that it is a lot of space if you are not taking furniture. My hope is that we will be able to take most of our kitchen items (minus anything that requires electricity), some holiday decorations, linens, and some pictures and books.
In addition to the size of the place, we have to remember that bedrooms there don’t have any closets. One of the bedrooms has a wardrobe and another has bookcases. So we are going to need to focus on storage solutions right away. And it will be easier if we cull down the items that we take to those that mean the most to us, it really puts some perspective on your belonging.
Red, White and Tulips 