At the end of the year, my work contract will finish up and we will be returning to Australia. We all have mixed emotions - we have good friends in Sweden, the MRC rugby club, Skåne Old Boys and Tomas has just settled in the international school. On top of all that, there's still a bunch of travel we would like to do. But, on the other hand, it will be great to see friends and family again, return to our Australian rugby club and swim at a proper beach.
My actual contract end date is the 22nd December, but we have a few plans to finish up the trip. Alana and her friend will be visiting for most of December, so we have some trips and visits planned for them. We are also planning on taking a trip up into Norway at the end of our holiday and returning to Australia in mid January.
But it's never as simple as that. We have lists of things that need to be done before we can head home, in no particular order, and definitely not complete:
1) Pack and send the sea freight,
2) Pack and send the air freight,
3) Organise a school in Australia for Tomas,
4) Get the final scans and checks to make sure Tomas has fully recovered from the Pancreatitis,
5) Organise temporary accommodation in Australia until we are able to move back into our house,
6) Fill our all relevant customs papers for bringing our things back to Australia and tax papers for leaving Sweden
7) Complete rugby clearance forms to say that we are cleared by Swedish rugby to move the the Australian competition (we don't have outstanding fees, doping accusations, punishments etc)
8) Clean the house and sort out the remaining furniture for moving out
9) Book the trips for Alana's visit and our December/Jan trip
10) Finalise my new job description in Australia as well as my leave for the final holiday
This is just a sample of what we have on our plate at the moment. But the one I wanted to talk about in this part of the blog was the packing.
Since we were not moving to Sweden permanently, part of our work contract in Australia meant that we could store our furniture and household items that we owned in Australia. We were provided with 50 cubic meters of storage. This had not been a fun thing to organise - we had a surveyor come out to look at how much we had, and he told us that we had way too much stuff - around 66 cubic meters. We ended up getting rid of some items and giving some away, as well as collapsing some things down into boxes. When they came to collect the stuff it turned out that we had less than 50, so we could probably have kept some of the thing we had gotten rid off.
We did have a few issues with the collection also, since my work is located on the other side of town, the removalists that they contracted were also from an hour or so drive from our place. We had warned that we had lots of stuff, so they planned to come and box everything up on the first day and then on the second day they would finish up the last few items and then the truck would arrive to pick it all up around 10am. This worked well as we had the cleaners coming in around 10:30 to do a full clean of the house ready for us to put it up for rent.
We had sorted a lot of our stuff into boxes in the garage, to make it easier to work out what we had, and we had told the removalists that there were lots of boxes there and that some of them, like ones with my fragile Warhammer models of collectable items, would need to be repacked properly. We also had a big collection of the carboard boxes from lego sets that the kids wanted to keep, so we tucked those in with the picture frames.
The removalists booked an 8:30 time for arriving on the first day, and I called them at 10:30 when they still hadn't arrived. When they did turn up, there were only two of them and they started packing the items for a short time before heading out for lunch. They had about 75% of the house packed by 4pm, but hadn't event started on the garage where most of the gear was. But they decided it was time to finish for the day, and told us they would be back at 8am the next day to finish up.
At 9:30 the next day the truck arrived to collect the boxes, but the removalists still hadn't arrived. The drivers called them and they turned up around 10. They then panicked when they saw how much was left in the garage and called in a few extra hands. By the time the cleaners arrived at 10:30 the removalists were only just getting started and we had to organise the cleaners to get moving around the removalists. Unfortunately, since they were now under a time crunch, the removalists rushed the packing, and the boxes we had asked them to repack were just taken as they were, and the models were stuffed into boxes without much packing around them. By late afternoon, when they had finished, they told us that we needed to dispose of our own rubbish and that wasn't their job to take it away, and they left. It turns out the "rubbish" was all of the Lego boxes that we had wanted to keep, that had been thrown outside in the rain. While picking those up, I also found some bits of my warhammer models which had broken off and were sitting in the driveway as well as some of the parts of one of the kids video games. I am really hoping that the items survived the packing, and not super happy with the way it went.
In addition to the storage of our items, we were also allowed to ship things to Sweden. We had taken some things over when we did our visit in December and left them with friends, but now we had the option of 6 cubic meters of sea freight and 1 cubic meter of air freight. Sea freight would take about 3-4 months and air freight was usually just under a month. Due to some misunderstandings we were told that we couldn't take our computers by air freight as they had a lithium cell battery (which was removable..) so the computers needed to go sea freight. The first time over we had avoided taking much seafreight as we knew it would need to be stuff that would need to come home and hence reduce how much new stuff we could bring back. This time we ended up with some items, a TV, some bikes, books, playstation games etc. The air freight was items that we wanted more quickly - some clothes, video game consoles etc.
===
Now it was time to look at what would come back and how. Since we'd used 3 cubic meters of our 6m^3 allowance coming over, we had 9 cubic meters to come back with, as well as 1 cubic of air freight. On the previous trip we had converted our air freight into additional sea freight, but this time we were keen to get some things back faster.
It took some thinking to work out how we would do it. The sea freight would take about 3 months to come back, but would constitute the biggest amount of stuff we could send. Anything that didn't make the sea freight would have to go in air freight or suitcases, or else we would have to leave it behind. It was expensive to increase the capacity we were sending, more so than the value of the items we wanted to send, so there wasn't much desire to pay to send more.
We weren't going to be sending essentials by sea freight - we would leave the beds, kitchen table and chairs, cooking equipment and couches behind, so we could possibly look at sending the items early so they wouldn't get held up over Christmas and we would have them fairly soon after we arrived back in Australia. We managed to get confirmation that the computers could go air freight if we removed the cell battery from them, so that was another problem solved.
The removal company sent a surveyor through to look at what we had, and he estimated that we wanted to send about 15 cubic meters back, well over our allowance. Since the size of a shipping container is 10 cubic meters, the company allowed us to go from 9 to 10 cubic with no additional cost, but another 5 cubic meters would be expensive.
This started our crazy packing. Kristine again took on the role of Tetris master and began packing down our stuff into boxes. We collapsed the computer desks we wanted to take back, packed boxes tightly with books, clothes, toys etc and then came the Lego. We had brought over a huge amount of loose Lego in order to complete some Lego sets that we had parts of, and we had bought a huge amount of Lego on the trip. I started by pulling apart the big sets and breaking them down into ziplock bags. Kristine sorted the loose Lego bits and made stacks of each type of bricks - a tower of 2x4 bricks, another of 4x10 plates etc. This let her stack the Lego in flat blocks and greatly reduced the size.
In the end we measured a few times and came up with about 9-10 cubic meters. One of the issues is that we were never sure if we had 10 cubic meters in measurement, or if we had a 10 cubic meter container that we could fill. This might not sound different but there was a big difference between the two. If we had a 10 cubic meter container then we would have air gaps between the oddly shaped boxes, or we might not be able to stack multiple tall items on top of each other because they would exceed the height of the container etc. If it was just that we had 10 cubic meters in size then we could measure the size of each box and tally those up.
For example if we had a container that was 2m tall by 2m wide by 2.5m long and we had boxes that were 0.75m tall then we would not be able to stack more than 2 boxes on top of each other and would end up with 500mm space empty at the top of the container that we wouldn't be able to fully fill. However if the 10 cubic meters was just a size measurement then we didn't need to consider this and could just work out the volume of each box and add them together... Can you tell I'm an engineer who massively overthinks these things..
Anyway, we never really got a straight answer and it didn't matter in the end, because the removalists were happy with what we had and took it all without complaint. It was collected Wednesday 6th Nov and sailed from Helsingborg on the 11th of November. We can expect it to arrive in Australia by the end of January and be cleared through customs and ready for delivery by mid Feb.
The next step is now working out the air freight. We had a cubic meter, but it needed to include the computer boxes and monitors. I find the best way to start is to use tape and mark out a 1m x 1m x 1m cube on the floor and up the wall, so you can stack the boxes in that area. Again, we run into the issue that the boxes might be 0.90m tall, so you have a 10cm strip at the top - if it is container-sized then that is wasted space, if it is purely volume then you have another 0.1 cubic meters that you can work with. Likewise the TV we were hoping to bring back is 1.3m long, so its important to determine if it will fit.
In the end we came up with the computers, monitors, TV and 5 small boxes (the white ones in the pic above). That means we know what can fit in the space and now just have to work with what can fit in the boxes.
The air freight is due to go on the 23rd of December, so we still have time.
=====
One other part of shipping to Australia is the customs forms:
