Moving Day

Since it's been almost a month since our shipment arrived, I thought I'd better get some pictures up.  As you can imagine, after living several months without your "stuff", it is very exciting when it finally arrives.  As usual, not much notice is given and I was out at a grocery store one morning when I got the call from John that they were ready to deliver our HHE (Household Effects - the "big" shipment).  They were to arrive around noon.

So, I went home and told our housekeeper that we would be working with the movers that afternoon.  Of course, around noon, I got another call saying it would be two.  So, we sat around waiting (I on the internet and Juliet finding smaller tasks since she had put the major cleaning on hold).  Sometime after 2 a guy finally shows up but he needs a rake to try to lift some wires so the truck can get in!!  Well, after some back and forth, it was decided that the truck was too big to get over the small entrance to our street (there's a little "bridge" over a gully).  So, the container would need to be unloaded onto a smaller truck:

Big Truck!

Smaller truck...

Opening the first crate

How they get the empty crate off the truck:

Driving the first load to the house

I think it took about 3 smaller truck loads to get all the stuff from the crates to the house.  The funny thing was that each girl arrived home on the bus (at different times since Arianna had an activity) and never saw the big truck.  Abigail was wondering where I was when she got home (I was out on the road observing the unloading).  A little while later she found out when the boxes began to be moved in. The whole process took a few hours.  And then the work of unpacking began.  But I worked on it for a week or two and everything in mostly in it's place.  We still need to have the pictures hung, but it's nice to have our stuff!!

It still took another two weeks to receive the "faster" air shipment (the dilemma I wrote about earlier), but that too finally arrived and it was all in good shape.  Some birds had some fun on my cello crate:

But at least the contents were in good shape!

A view of our front porch after we had already gotten rid of most of the boxes!  

We are waiting for our final shipment which we're told is in Harare.  It's our consumables.  Here's what they looked like before we packed them:

Fortunately, we have a lot of storage space in our kitchen!  

We will be glad when the unpacking is done for a while!  But now that our stuff is here, we are ready for you to come visit.  You might want to wait until the elections are over, but Zim is a beautiful place so come on over!