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Thursday, February 16, 2012

Planning an International Military Move

The move to South Korea isn’t a typical move. It actually felt like 6 moves in one and honestly the task was a bit daunting. After much research including a very helpful document put together by the Osan Officer's Spouses Club. We finally settled on a colored dot coding system and methodically went through each room marking which move each item belonged in. This part felt good - like an intense spring cleaning session for the entire house. Here's how the moves broke down:


1. Unaccompanied baggage: This 1,000 load should be available when we arrive. We shipped things like clothing, our primary kitchen appliances, bath necessities like a shower curtain, shampoo, soap, and towels and everything in Cooper's room - because when you have a baby everything is a necessity. And a few luxury items like the Margarita Machine (if you've had a marg at our house you understand) and family photos. Basically this load was anything we needed to live on for a couple of months - but not that we would need during our next month of travels.


2. Korea move: This 8,000 pound allotment should arrive in Korea between 2 and 4 months. For this load we primarily loaded anything that we'd want to have over the next 2 years keeping in mind that the things we leave behind could potentially be in storage much longer. We also had to keep in mind the pounds allotment and the smaller living space. 


3. Local storage: This move was our things that will stay in storage here in Oklahoma. It included things like our guest bedroom set (we probably won't host a large number of visitors in Korea), extra clothes, and much of the outdoor and garage paraphernalia. We also decided to donate much of this load to Goodwill. 


4. One month of travel: These are the things that we need for the month of travel while we are moving, visiting family and then flying to Korea. We also went through this allotment a final time and mailed many items to ourselves.


5. Airline travel: This is the limited baggage that we are allowed on the flight. One bag for each of us along with the playyard, the carseat and stroller.


6. Car Shipment: We also had to determine not only which vehicle to take but how we would get it to Dallas to ship it. We decided that we'd be taking our Acadia and we'd ship it right before we left the country. Options we had to weigh here was either being without a car for a month in the states or once we go to Osan - we decided it would be easiest to be without in ROK. 


Next we had to sell our cars, rent our home and find family to take care of our dogs.

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