756 Cubic Feet

our stuff

This morning I woke up in a cold sweat to the sounds of magpies and cockatoos. Where am I? I was also having an intense dream about moving and our belongings. Obviously this has something to do with the fact that I meant to post an entry about our move days ago. So my guilt finally got the best of me, this time while I was sleeping.

Dreams are always difficult to remember and decipher. I have heard that paper and a pen on your nightstand always helps so that you can immediately write down what you can remember after waking. Never really seems to work for me.

The dream brought me back to New York on our last day. It was a flashback dream. I had been there before. It was our last five hours in New York. Let’s just say it was a tough five hours. I won’t get into the details but it involved running chores in severe thunderstorms, getting into my first taxi cab accident, and a brief emotional breakdown.

A rainy and dramatic last day in New York

Prior to this horrific five hours, things went very smoothly. In fact, I have never experienced such an easy move. That is partly because we didn’t have to pack anything. Nothing! You see, when you move to the other side of the planet the movers actually pack for you (it’s very luxurious). This is done because 1) you are paying for it and 2) for customs and insurance. It was truly an awe inspiring experience (especially for someone who hates to pack). In a matter of four hours, five men had packed all of our belongings into boxes and wrapped our furniture in layers of cardboard. All of the boxes (101 of them in total) could have been a museum piece, resembling the works of the artist Rachel Whiteread. By 4pm all of our stuff was loaded onto a truck.

NY International Movers working their magic

We escorted our belongings downstairs, said goodbye and waved as the truck pulled away. All of our belongings, our life, are on a ship, currently heading down the Panama Canal (if only I had placed a GPS tracker in one of the boxes). The container is due to arrive in the port of Sydney on November 25^th. Then it will sit for a couple of weeks in customs and quarantine before we actually get the delivery. The day it arrives is going to feel a lot like Christmas….Well actually, it will probably be Christmas day! We can’t wait.

The path of our belongings

Our entire life is sitting in this container, packed up into 756 cubic feet. I never really thought about how much space my life takes up nor did I ever feel the need to calculate it. In order to put it into perspective, I had to create some comparisons- the Empire State Building is 37 million cubic feet, a mid size vehicle is about 119 cubic feet, a 20 foot long shipping container is 1170 cubic feet. In the scheme of things 756 cubic feet sure does not sounds like that much stuff. The reality about living in NYC is that it forced us to compact our life into only the necessities.

 
Our space has nearly doubled in size. I would estimate that our old apartment, which was in a tenement building on 47^th Street, would equal the area of the first floor in our new apartment. What to do with all this space? Shop!