Ucube results

It seems like an eternity ago that we moved (in fact, it's been a year), but I've always meant to post a more complete review of the upakweship ucube50, the method we used to move many of our odds and ends to Berlin (when I was looking at all our options, posts about people who used it were super helpful - that's why I'm writing one).

I mentioned some of the motivations for the service in my post on packing the ucube - both due to our moving budget and inclination, we didn't want to go with suitcases only, nor could we move all our furniture. With the ucube50, we had sufficient space to bring some of our larger items and winter clothes.

Overall, I'd say our experience was good. The cube arrived as estimated - in fact, a little early (here is a post from arrival day) - and nearly everything was in good condition. One or two mugs cracked and some of David's discs warped (most of them just temporarily), but I actually attribute that to packing rather than any Ucube issues. We did ship our kitchenaid, two computer monitors, large-ish framed artwork, and David's computer - all of those things arrived in good condition. I will note that I was extremely careful in packing those things, though!

Positives:
The ucube50 seems to be uniquely small for overseas moving - a service you can't get elsewhere
Affordable/reasonably priced
Allows you to pack your own, excellent for a detail-oriented person like me
We worked with one person the whole time to coordinate - we always knew who to contact
Our cube stuck to schedule, and even arrived on the early side

Negatives:
Scheduling the pickup of our cube was difficult
The driver in Columbus struck us as not super trustworthy (he signed paperwork as "DRIVER GEORGE" and seemed to sway a little when standing still)
The German delivery end seemed to be shocked that I didn't speak German
The cardboard cube needs to be packed pretty full to be sturdy
The lid closure didn't seem very secure (though it stayed on just fine)

For us, these negatives were small compared to the positives. If you googled this review and want to put it in context of other, negative reviews, I will say that (to my knowledge) the pickup, shipping, and delivery, are all done by contractors. Some are good, and some are less so! We also didn't have to deal with any damage or delay, so can't comment on their response to that.

Timeline:
Requested quote: May 19
Booked shipment: June 3
Cube delivered: June 10
Cube picked up: June 24
Arrival at terminal: July 6
Notice of sailing: July 17
Estimated UK arrival: July 30
Contacted about delivery: August 6
Delivery: August 17

And finally, the arrival pictures (for packing pictures, see this post). The cardboard outside was pretty pristine when we packed it, and got marginally beat up on the way:

This is what the inside looked like - I was relieved to find nothing had shifted.

As we unpacked it and David's friends carried it up the stairs (my back was pretty bad just then):

And then the boxes in the "spare room." Of course, once we got our second load of furniture in December, our spare room became our main hangout room - my desk is in that corner now.

The arrival of our cube!

Around noon today, we got the cube that we shipped on June 24! The front door to our new building is nice and wide, so the delivery guy agreed to bring it into our hallway. This is how it looked as I waited for David and a group of co-workers who helped us carry everything up three flights!

And here is the final pile of boxes, up in what we now call the "spare room."

David excitedly opened the box with his disc golf bag and a few boxes of discs. This is how excited he was before he discovered that many of the other discs god squished. :-(

I'll do a more thorough review of upakweship soon (when I was comparison shopping packing, I found it super helpful) but for now I can say that everything went according to plan!

Day 0?

Tomorrow we fly to Berlin, but tonight we finished packing our bags. It feels like so much stuff, even though we did our best to pare down our belongings. I hope we are ready for adventure!

Packing a U-Cube 50

My Potsdam job generously offered me 2000 euros to move. That's 2000 euros specifically to be used for the shipment of household goods, reimbursed by them. But most overseas moves either cost more (full service packing+shipping, running $3000+) or less (sell/give away all belongings, start fresh). David was advocating for getting rid of everything and starting fresh, but I argued that we'd spend at least 2000 euro replacing everything we could ship for 2000 euro.

We settled on using a U-Cube 50 from UPakWeShip. The idea is that they send you a flat packed unassembled cube, you put it together and fill it, then they ship it (via boat) to Europe. To us, the cube felt like a lot of space sometimes, then other times like no space at all. When I was looking for information and reviews on packing one of these, I didn't find all that much, so I thought I'd write a little more about it.

I think the site recommends giving them 6 weeks notice, but we booked ours ~4 weeks ahead of time and it turned out ok. We filled out an initial contract and made a deposit before they sent us our packed flat ucube:

When we opened it, it looked more like this:

There is some damage to the top of the cardboard sides, but it was ok because that part went under the lid. 

Online it says the dimensions are 45" by 37" and 39" high. So we got some standard size boxes (heavy duty small and medium boxes from Lowe's) and started stacking those into the palate. There is a little bit of wiggle room in the dimensions - when I packed three 18" x 12" boxes and placed them next to each other, they measured ~38.5" instead of 36" due to the width of the cardboard and a little bulging. That ended up being fine, but it was a little bit of a tight squeeze to get the cardboard sides on.

We ended up setting it up in our living room to make sure that all of the boxes would fit when we finally packed it for pickup outside. The sides are cardboard and there's no lock, so we did not want to leave it outside without watching it. It would be an equally bad idea to set it up for the first time on pickup day and be surprised to find out that nothing fits how you would hope.

Here is how the first rows of boxes went in on moving day:

After that, I had to get creative and start building boxes that were slightly different sizes. Below shows our first few of those - we had some art prints to ship (on the left) and needed a slightly taller box for a few items (in the back on the right). I ended up building quite a few boxes in strange sizes, starting with large heavy duty boxes as a base. 

After that the sides went on, so packing looked a lot less interesting. This is the last picture I took  - it includes all of our boxes packed up to the top. 

After this, we put the lid on and waited for the truck to show up. The only picture I have with a lid on is from our trial runs in the living room:

We fit 16 total boxes in the UCube. I would say 12 of those are relatively big boxes (meaning roughly a 12" x 16" x 16" or bigger) and the other four are full of odds and ends in the corners.

Each box is numbered (you can see the signs and the writing on the boxes) and we have a spreadsheet listing the contents of each one. I would do this anyway (I used letters, not numbers, for our Seattle-Columbus move), but it is also required for customs and insurance. 

The driver picking up our cube wasn't going far, but I think he was passing it on to another driver who would bring it to the nearby shipping terminal. After that, it heads to the coast and gets on a boat (we apparently get an email when that happens). It'll clear customs in the UK, then get shipped to Berlin. We've been told 6-8 weeks, so we're hoping to have our own apartment by then. Hopefully I'll have an unpacking blog post within a few months!

And the move begins!

I know I promised that I'd have exciting posts about living in Berlin, but it turns out that we are still in Columbus and knee-deep in the logistics of the move. In the past week, we have:

• Finally gotten plane tickets (amazingly, less than three weeks ahead of time)
• Sorted through our clothes for giant donation piles
• Circulated a loooong list of items we'd like to sell or give away
• Bought boxes 
• Confirmed a UCube50 with UPakWeShip
• Made a plan to eat much of the food in our apartment
• Got some new luggage and a luggage scale

Also, we took a semi-spontaneous overnight trip to Mammoth Cave National Park and are both doing our best to work full time. And see all our friends before we leave. So many things.

I might do more logistics posts over the next few weeks. I do find logistics super interesting, and I also want to put more information out there. When we were figuring out what to do, I had a genuinely hard time finding resources for mid-budget international moves (everything is either "check two bags and start over with nothing" or "my company gave me a $10,000 limit"), so I sort of want to document a bit.

In that spirit, here are our boxes. Let the move begin!