4 Weeks Until We're On The Island! Sofa-Swapping, Label-Making and More...

In four weeks from right now, we'll be in our villa! Eeek! Exciting, yet overwhelming.

Today I worked on shipping labels for our goods. They need our name, destination, phone number, and box number. I made about 120, not that we will have anywhere near that many boxes! I want to put one inside, and two outside, to make it easier to sort them. Plus there's no need for me to take a few pages of blank shipping labels down, no reason to save them. 

If you are unfamiliar with the island, there aren't addresses, per se, which makes shipping and mailing interesting. Some addresses are as vague as, "11 miles north", meaning, "We live around 11 miles north of the only bridge on the island, come find us!". Our villa is in a community, so I roll with our villa number and the community. (Some info obscured).

I made a template to spraypaint my pink dots to indicate if the box goes in the bodega or the villa when it arrives, but I struggled to properly "aim" the spraypaint. I was making it more difficult than I needed to - I ordered a Bingo "Daub" in hot pink from Amazon, which will be a much more streamlined marking process!

I also booked our U-Pack Trailer. PODS and their competitors force you to call for a price, which I despise. One competitor was over $1,000 more for the same route as U-Pack. I also considered U-Haul Boxes - what I liked about them was that you could order as many as you want to be delivered, but only pay for the ones you use. What I don't like is that they are not as solid as a trailer or container, and they are considerably smaller. If you think of volume, you have a lot more flexibility to Tetris items into one large box, than into four smaller ones. Smaller ones will have more dead space. 

U-Pack will drop our trailer on 7/18, and we have 3 business days to load it. I chose 7/18 as that is a Thursday, giving us the weekend to do our best Tetris job ever. It comes with a ramp and a lockable cargo net. We only pay for the linear feet we use; the balance of the trailer will be filled with commercial goods going in the same direction. That gives us a lot more flexibility on what we take, and the more efficiently we stack, the more cost-effective it will be.

In light of the poor reviews for the sofa we impulse-bought yesterday, when Nathan finished work we returned to Living Spaces to cancel the order and re-select one with better reviews. If I understated the size of their stores, please reference the main photo, as well as this one - and there are still areas I didn't capture!

We both like the "new" sofa even better - it's a more comfortable seat, and the fabric has a herringbone-type pattern which should be more forgiving than a solid fabric, for about the same price. I normally am a serial researcher before any purchase over $50, and lamented not doing more research yesterday, but I wasn't sure if Nathan would go for buying a new sofa. 

We'll still be able to have it delivered directly to our freight forwarder in Houston, too!