Making your way from one side to the other side of the US.

When I first move from Europe to the US, we were in Seattle on the north part of the west coast as it’s the location where my husband was going to be based on for work. After almost a year there, we managed to relocate to the east coast in New York as we always wanted. Once we get this great news, we had to understand what it meant in terms of logistics. It’s a more than 2800 miles journey and we had to take all our furniture with us. Making your way from a side to the other side of the US.

I’m going to go through all the steps we followed to get to our new place. So first, we had to find our home so we had a look at different places. Due to the pandemic of coronavirus, we couldn’t visit anywhere. But luckily, we were very happy with the resident we were living in and they had properties there too. We got in touch with them and did a virtual tour of a few apartments before choosing the one we wanted. It’s a bit weird to move into a place that you haven’t seen in real-time. We were happy with our new flat but we asked many questions before making the decision. The people we dealt with were very helpful which was nice. The residence is Avalon: https://www.avaloncommunities.com/

Once we found the new place and got a moving date, we ended our current lease. Then we found the moving company, I talk about it in detail in my article: https://elvinechloe.com/organizing-your-move-to-the-other-side-of-the-world/. We choose one and made sure all dates worked for us. Most of these companies can deliver from 4 to 21 days depending on the distance.

We also did some reading to understand the cost of living in our new place, the tax system, the bills… We contacted our Internet, flat insurance, and electricity company to close our accounts and the future ones to open accounts. You don’t have to rush to do this kind of thing apart from the Internet as some operators can have a busy schedule. We also updated our addresses closer to the date for our bank account and the general things using Updater: https://www.updater.com/

Closer to the day, we packed our luggage. We packed all the non-fragile items such as clothes, books… We also booked our flight ticket and made sure that we allowed enough time for the movers to come and take everything before physically move. The day before they came, we made sure we moved all our stuff in one room. And took everything out of drawers and cupboard. The day we just stayed out of their way the whole time.

We then went to New York and stay at relatives for a week until we get the key to our new apartment. Previously, we had sent an inflatable mattress and bedsheets so we could kind of camp in the new place for a few days. We got an appointment with the Internet company and get everything installed in a few hours. And as we opened our electricity account before the move, everything worked when we arrived. The movers were faster than expected. They contacted us in less than two weeks. They were ready to come and deliver our stuff and we could start living in our new place.