People who move country a lot and have to pay to ship their stuff, can you tell me...

[Shitemum]

What have you regretted taking with you in the past?
What have you regretted leaving behind?
How do you decide what to take and what to leave behind?
What items are the most important in terms of helping DCs to settle and feel at home in the new location?

6 months to go...total chaos here, 18 years worth of acummulated junk. We can't afford to ship much, it's about 3 Euros a kilo.
Any advice gratefully received!

bump

no-one?

It depends were you're moving from & to

I agree. I think it depends where you're moving from/to as some countries might have pain in the neck customs regulations that just aren't worth the hassle and others might be very easy about the whole moving household thing. We've moved both ways for this reason - first we moved everything (when the company paid and there were no customs restrictions), and now we have a storage room in the UK with some of our furniture and other things we wanted to keep but didn't bring for our more recent moves, moving only with our clothes etc. and some of our ds' toys, books etc. Everything else was either left in storage, given away to family/friends and the charity shop or sold. (These kind of moves are great for getting rid of unnecessary clutter!)

Our ds hasn't seemed to have minded as he kept his favourite things during our recent moves (top of list: first his Thomas the Tank Engine stuff, now his growing Lego collection!). Maybe ask your children to prioritise what they'd like to take if you're not planning on taking everything? Don't forget that movers can often damage goods, which you might not want to risk if you have any antiques or other valuables. Also check the customs regulations and whether you can, and if you would be happy to, live in a furnished place in your new country (or part-furnished with your own short-term furniture bought from Ikea or somewhere similar).

Good luck with the move; I hope it goes as smoothly as possible for you!

We had a massive chuck-out at home. Then shipped most of the DCs things and most of our clothes, kitchen bits, some reference books, CDs, DVDs, music system, some bedding. We did bring a bit of furniture but not the bits that would be ruined by heat and humidity. Luckily we were allowed to put stuff in storage- if not we would have sold it or put it in a relative's spare room (if we could find an obliging relative). We didn't originally bring the DCs baby record books but they needed the details for various school projects so we brought them out next time we visited the UK. Photos of their old life are worth bringing. I regret leaving behind my house rabbits. I didn't think we'd be away for so long and I miss them dreadfully. Quarantine after a two year posting seemed a long time, but following a five year stint it would have been worthwhile.

Thanks everyone!

Well we are moving from Spain to Scotland and I have been told by the shippers at the airport that we can ship to Edinburgh airport for 3 ? a kilo more or less. Or to the door by van for about the same except it'll take a week instead of a day or two.
I'd better find out about customs tho...thanks for mentioning that.

We are leaving our house here with an agency for holiday lets so we will leave it basically furnished and have to leave all the kitchen stuff.
We could leave some stuff in a locked cupboard as we will hopefully be coming back once or twice a year, we could take heavy books etc back that way, a few each trip.

It's so easy to replace things like LEGO and classic kids books in the UK because of charity shops and Ebay so we should probably be fairly ruthless with the replacable stuff.
I wish DP was a bit more modern and would consider copying all his CDs onto something portable - they take up about 10 boxes!

There are no charity shops here so I am relying on friends to buy stuff or take stuff we will give away off our hands.
I have made a list of the saleable stuff - it is 8 pages long

Why does the euro sign appear as a question mark on MN?

DH made me get rid of most of my books. We didn't even have to pay ourselves!

I regret that a lot. Especially as we had 2 boxes of "kitchen" stuff that there was no room for in our apartment, and went in the boot fair pile when we moved to a bigger house.

I think a lot depends on where you are going and how old the dcs are.

When we moved here, from UK we used freight forwarding, and shared a wagon with a beer company going to Munich. They parked up , we packed it, then they drove here, it arrived the afternoon we did. Much, much cheaper but I don't know about doing it the other way, going back to the UK, worth investigating though.

We bought loads with us - not much furniture but lots of toys, ride on tractors, even a slide and climbing frame as dh had built that in the UK. Bought all our books, kitchen essentials, all photos, important things. The only thing we got rid of was furniture and dh still regrets some of those things which went.

i regret getting rid of all our bay stuff as I never expected to have another!!

Take lots of treats & things you like that you can only buy in Spain. You might miss being in spain & having a reminder will help.