Household Goods (HHG) Arrival

Episode № 118 is the one where our 8,212 lbs of household goods get delivered! Just 70 days, door-to-door from Arkansas to Japan.

Transcript

Episode № 118 Household Goods (HHG) Arrival

Welcome back!
Lady Jupiter Podcast is the audio companion to LadyJupiter.com; a lifestyle blog that I won’t be updating for a while.
In this episode I will share an update on our life as affected by the U.S. military, then continue with a blog-related status check, and wrap up with something domestic.

Today in our military-affected lives I have nothing significant to update.

Since we last talked we were getting our little house ready for two sets of movers, and it finally happened!

We cleaned up the house, which took longer than 30 seconds. The first set of movers arrived a moment after 8am, and they promptly removed the temporary furniture that we were borrowing - specifically - a dining room table with chairs, a couch and love seat, a coffee table, an end table or two, a lamp or two, and a couple of twin beds.

Immediately afterward, our other movers arrived with the seven crates that we hadn’t seen since May. They were contracted to empty our crates, but to also move everything into the house, PLUS we requested a full unpack, which means that they also emptied each box, and took the boxes and packing material with them.

To our medium surprise, they were done in one day. The surprise was minimal because we had five guys, and only seven crates. Once everything was inside the house and the big furniture placed, the supervisor assembled furniture while the other guys emptied boxes and stacked the contents on the floor. This was good and bad.

Good, because the cardboard was out of the house. Bad because they stacked objects in front of any storage furniture. It took us a few days to clear a path through the books to access our empty bookshelves. The kitchen was pure chaos - again, dishes were stacked in front of cabinets, including the pantry with plenty of deep storage space.

I don’t have square footage data to compare our last house in Arkansas with our current home in Japan, but I can tell you that our new home is definitely smaller. We thought that we did a great job of shedding stuff in our last six months in Arkansas…and while we did get rid of bookshelves and other bulky furniture, we did not get rid of the things that used to be stored in said bookshelves and other bulky furniture - oops. So now we’re surrounded by homeless objects. Downstairs things without previous cabinets, and upstairs things without previous built-in shelves or dressers.

It was a decent day overall. Requesting a full unpack was an aggressive choice for our 8,212 lbs of possessions. We didn’t want to deal with the cardboard, so that goal was certainly met. But next time, we’ll just unpack the kitchen and deal with the cardboard in the rest of the house. That’s essentially what we did when we moved to Kansas. That PCS moved us into a bigger house, and we similarly had a good sized crew. Kid Jupiter wasn’t in the picture yet, so I was able to spend my undivided time unpacking the kitchen myself. By the time that crew left, the kitchen was ready for me to cook our first meal in our three story lavender house.

Breakage with this PCS was minimal. I think that we only suffered two broken dishes, and neither were life altering. Our furniture survived just fine, and nothing molded in transit.

Our masterplan to ship the household goods early was a good one for us. We definitely could have lived out of our suitcases sooner, and lighter, but putting so many things in the mail to ourselves was a good move too. Mister Jupiter had his Mess Dress before we reunited, and he actually needed it - that was a surprise. The dresses I shipped myself were worn right away when my luggage got stranded in Hawai’i. As planned, we were able to buy or borrow whatever we needed in the states, and our stuff arrived about 12 days after Kid Jupiter and I landed in Tokyo.

Seventy days from watching our crates drive away, to watching them arrive. Most of the wait was just getting us to Japan, and giving the shipper a delivery address. Our crates were due to arrive in Japan when we were in Las Vegas, so they actually moved pretty quickly. We just assumed that they would take a while to actually get off of the boat, and take a while to get through customs. I do have some AirTag locations that I screen captured since they left us, but I haven’t had the time yet to update the blog post about them. I look forward to catching up one day. Anyhoo!

Once Mister Jupiter picked our house, he shared the address with the shipping company and they had a two week wait at that point. It was all pretty easy, but I did miss having my closet. But joke’s on me! Not only will closet organization and clothing storage prove to be as much of a struggle as the kitchen, but I’ve been told that summer came early to Japan. I can’t handle the heat and humidity, so even though I have my closet back, there are so few things that I can wear without feeling like I am going to overheat and burst into flames. Jeans? Too risky. Polyester? Haha! No way. Gauze. Gauze pants are the winners when it’s too hot to wear clothes. Breezy dresses are 50/50; I like avoiding pants, but my preferred smoothing undergarments are difficult to maneuver when I’m sweaty…It’s tricky. But I have also heard that summer doesn’t last forever, so I’m holding on to the promise of autumn.

For today’s LadyJupiter.com update…the site is up, but hasn’t been updated since June. I’ll get back to it when our house is less chaotic.

And lastly something domestic.

It seems that our last house had more storage space in the kitchen than I realized. I think a lot of that was from the drawers we had, instead of cabinets. I mean, we had cabinets in the kitchen, like the typical upper cabinets around the range hood. But most of the storage under the counter tops were pull out drawers that we used for pots and pans, daily dishes, canning jars and other containers.

Now we have deep cabinets cabinets again, but the normal kind that require knee pads to reach the very back, so the obvious solution is to avoid using the deepest recesses for anything that we want to use regularly. This kitchen is definitely going to take some time to figure out.

Last month when Mister Jupiter gave me a tour of the house, I thought that we would probably need an appliance garage if we wanted to see any of our counter tops and work surfaces. What seemed like a casual want, has suddenly become more of an immediate need if we want to get the dishes off the floor. I’ve got a loose plan though! Not only do we have an IKEA about 30 minutes away, but we also have plenty of home goods stores nearby and a weak yen…so now I just need to measure the largest objects in the kitchen and several spaces. Luckily for me, Kid Jupiter LOVES solo time with his dad, so I’ll be free on weekends to drive around to different stores with my measuring tape, and camera. I can spend as much time as I need to find the perfect intersection of what’s available locally, and what fits our objects in our available space. But I need to be quick so that we can actually use the kitchen.

It is very convenient that we have a lot of delicious foods available to purchase nearby, but I really just love cooking and I nobody enjoys seeing massive kitchen clutter. Now I can work on replacing some of the storage furniture that we gave away in Arkansas. Hopefully with more versatile options that can be deconstructed and moved easier than the previous shelves.

And that’s it for today.

Just for fun, I wanted to remind you that you can always reach me via email - podcast @ LadyJupiter .com . I can’t promise prompt responses, but I wanted you to know that I am here and available for questions or feedback. Podcast @ LadyJupiter .com use it wisely!

I will talk to you when I can record next → Bye for now!