Worry...A Waste of Time

Worry, a Waste of Time

When I was a kid, I remember a sermon where worry was described as a sin because that meant you weren't trusting in God to take care of you. Not sure where I stand on such a harsh pronouncement of worry but I do know that much of what we worry about never comes to pass. We FINALLY received our container contents, after countless delays, in Detroit, New York, the Bahamas, and finally with Customs here in Costa Rica.

Our Moving Crew

Aldemar (our favorite Tico) is in the middle in a stripped shirt, his Serenity crew to the right.

 

Imagine that John and Diane Franklin reduced their life belongings to fit in this truck!! 

I am so proud of us!

 

Here were our list of worries:

Although we thought we were going to avoid it, our container got caught up in the Holidays and three weeks were lost. The container never left Detroit for over a week and New York for 2 weeks after it left our house.

Freezing cold weather...would liquid contents freeze and burst causing problems with customs and our boxes leaking? (I lost a bit of sleep over that one.)

Stealing (many people told us how they were looted when they shipped.)

Breakage (Oh! The reports of breakage were horrendous!)

Customs finding questionable items and trashing our boxes looking for more.

Customs questioning what were we planning on doing with all the gardening/farming items and having trouble with it.

What if our contents got mixed up with another container (like mixed up babies in a hospital) and we were sent someone else's belongings?

As you can see, the worries were many. BUT I am pleased to say, we have only found one broken item and no theft. Most of our boxes were never even opened by Customs; we might have spotted 2 boxes out of almost 250! We aren't sure if they were opened or not. Almost all the boxes had our original taping still intact.

For Those Moving to Costa Rica...

I recently found out that I have some readers of this blog that are following it because they are planning a move to CR and want more information. For those readers here are some tips for shipping household goods:

• Choose a shipper that originates here in CR. Our shipper has contacts and inspectors that he selects personally and he followed our progress the whole way. Don't select a company from your home country.
• Pay extra for loading time. The allotted 2 hours is simply not enough to pack the container properly and secure the contents to prevent breakage. John packed our container for 5 days! We had to pay extra but because John packed everything so tight and carefully, we didn't have breakage. If you are just going to throw things into a container in the allotted time and not pack carefully, why bother? Sell your stuff and buy new once you arrive because it will likely be damaged.
• Wrap furniture and anything that can break thoroughly. We bought lots of bubble wrap, had Styrofoam, sheets, blankets, mattress covers and LOTS of tape. We couldn't believe how much tape we went through. We had friends picking up more tape for us even after buying lots, twice!
• Only ship household goods you don't want to part with because maybe they are sentimental or of good quality. We mostly gave our sentimental items to family but had quality household goods that we knew we either couldn't find here or it was cheaper to ship. Finding quality items in Costa Rica is hard, especially in the southern zone.
• Here is something we didn't do but only if we could do it over again! (Again? No Way! It was really hard and impossible without friends helping.) Anyway...try your hardest to figure out what you need right away and pay extra for boxes to fly with you, (we did do that.) What we didn't figure beforehand was to pack boxes that had contents we needed right away in the rental house while waiting for our house to be built. We didn't plan well on that and had to go through way too many boxes, finding maybe a few things in each box that we needed now. We have most of the boxes in storage and couldn't find everything we really need right now.
• When you ship household goods, you have to inventory the boxes and number them; which we did. We thought we had done a pretty good at this but have found we needed to be more specific with our personal column. We had a column for ourselves that the shipper and Customs didn't see and just deleted our column when we emailed them their copy. Their list looked more generic; such as “misc used kitchen items” or “misc. personal items” or “hand tools”, etc. If we would have done this in more detail we could have found items that we know are in the stacks somewhere, just can't find them because we didn't open up every box.

It is wonderful to have our belongings. Kinda like old friends showing up (actually having some friends show up would be better!) It was a odd feeling when the back of the truck was opened up and I recognized old blanket and old sheet wrapped around things. Strange how being without your “stuff” makes you REALLY desire it, even an old blanket can trigger a smile!

A few more of Serenity's workers. 

This is how they cut acres and acres of grass in

Serenity, by machete!!  But they are happy to have work that Ex-Pats bring.