August reflection

August was the month our move home stopped being a future plan and became boxes, deposits, eBay chancers, customs forms, and one final escape to Geneva.

Geneva

Despite being in the middle of leaving my job and packing up to move home, I buggered off to Switzerland for a few days to meet a friend.

It was my first time in Switzerland, and although the flights were cheap, that was very much where it ended. I was constantly surprised by the price of things. Maybe I’m just being a Scottish tight arse, but over 60 EUR for two pancake dishes and two cups of tea seemed extremely steep.

My friend and I seem to have unintentionally developed a habit of picking expensive places to meet. Last year it was Copenhagen, so apparently neither of us has learned anything.

Geneva

We didn’t have a great deal of time in Geneva, but I think we saw the most important things, including a big broken chair, more clocks and watches than you can shake a stick at, and lots of flags.

A new flat!

Our remote flat viewings in July weren’t part of the initial plan, but window shopping on Rightmove and Zoopla inevitably led to us applying for a flat just outside Dundee, our hometown.

Before getting accepted, we had to go through the motions of collecting references from our landlord, providing bank statements, putting down deposits, and the whole shebang. It was painful at times, but ultimately we thought it’d be worth it. We’ll arrive home with somewhere of our own, rather than temporarily moving in with family and having to move all of our stuff for a second time.

We were a little worried about the application - especially being in Germany with no recent UK history and relying on information coming out of Germany - but when that acceptance finally came through, it felt great. We had a place to get our boxes delivered to, use as our registered address with the bank, and call home for the foreseeable future.

Packing & moving

The love/hate relationship with eBay

We had made a rule: if it doesn’t fit in a box, it’s not coming home with us. This led to us trying to sell things on eBay Kleinanzeigen - an air fryer, PC monitors, push bikes, and all sorts. We priced everything very fairly because we were running out of time and wanted to get some money back. Despite that, and despite stating that the prices were fixed, we still had to deal with the absolute chancers on eBay. Some delusional, some rude, and some that seemed straight-up wacky.

We were glad to claw some cash back for things we’d bought in Germany, but there were deals to be had.

Typically, the thing I wanted to keep hold of for as long as possible, my dartboard, sold first. My working-from-home routine of throwing darts whilst waiting for my agents to run or builds to complete was ruined!

Selling my bike was painful too, but I had long been tempted by a bike fitting and a road bike instead of gravel, so the money I got for my old bike will go towards that.

Skip trips!

I loved a good clear-out before I moved to Germany. We would routinely load the car with a bunch of shite we’d somehow amassed, drive to the council skip, and launch things into huge metal containers.

We’d avoided this in Berlin through a mixture of laziness, fear, and not thinking we had much to throw away. Until this month, anyway. My brother came and helped us dispose of two mattresses: a horrible one that came with the apartment, then the emergency mattress that had gradually become the guest mattress and was mostly just sitting around taking up space.

In the end, it wasn’t as scary as expected, and we made several more trips with rubbish we couldn’t recycle or sell on.

We were surprised by the sheer amount of stuff we’d accumulated, and it has made us more conscious of our buying habits. Definitely something to improve going forward.

Inventories & customs

When we moved to Germany, it was very simple: around 10 big boxes shipped via ParcelMonkey for roughly £100.

Moving back, thanks to Brexit, was a lot more complicated. I know I’m speaking from a position of prior privilege here, but we had to inventory every single item we were bringing back, submit the list to HMRC, wait for them to review it, and eventually receive a reference number to attach to our shipment. And breathe.

That part, honestly, wasn’t so bad. Then we tried to arrange collection of our 27 boxes. We considered several options. They were all flawed. FedEx looked the most promising, but they wanted a more granular inventory of every single item, including its weight, value, and country of origin. Were we going to do that for 27 boxes full of used shite? Absolutely not.

We ultimately booked a company named Smoover. They were more expensive than FedEx, but their process was far simpler and they took care of customs so long as we did our part. After weeks of inventories, quotes, and trying to understand what on earth we were supposed to do, paying a bit more for somebody else to deal with it felt like money well spent.

Reading

A bad month for reading, and the first month this year when I didn’t complete a book. I had almost finished Blue Moon by Lee Child, but then I started the third Richard Osman book on my trip to Geneva and got hooked on that. So I ended August with two almost-finished books, but none completely read. A highly efficient system.

Wrap up

By the end of August, most of our life in Berlin was either sold, binned, or packed into 27 boxes. Next month, we follow them home. I’ll start my new job, we’ll settle into the new flat, and the next chapter will properly begin.