Moving Time

In preparation for our move, Ryan and I went through and organized/de-junked almost everything we own.  We missed about three boxes that were down in our storage room.  It took a lot of time and effort.  We also sold a good chunk of stuff that we plan on re-buying in the States (like our kitchen table).  I forgot to take before pictures of our place, but luckily the rental company came by to take some to post on their website (so weird to see our stuff on the site).  Our place is listed at 85 square meters (approx 915 square feet), 2 bedrooms, 1 bathroom, 1 toilet room, 1 main room and a garden (since we were on the ground floor.

The movers came and boxed up all our stuff.  Actually I have a lot of ikea square cabinet things and they just saran wrapped the whole unit organization boxes and all (except for the 5x5 one).  Our place was so empty when they left.  We borrowed some bedding from friends and camped out on the floor for a couple nights.  We wanted to stay at our place so we could put the kids down for bed and still be able to do some cleaning.  During one of the days the sister missionaries came and helped us clean for a couple hours. One of the Sisters (Anderson) is from Seattle and her sisters was college roommates with my sister.  Small world.  The picture is from when we had them over for dinner.  Anyways, the Sisters were a huge help.

It is normal to get a big fine when you move out of your apartment here.  The expectation of normal wear and tear is not really taken into account and you are expect to bring the apartment up to 'like new' standards.  With 2 little kids we knew we would be seeing a big fine.  We deep cleaned the apartment which included cleaning places I am positive were not cleaned before we moved in.  In the end we got charged 680 euros (floor, paint, broken fridge drawers and cleaning fee).  I expected all of that.  The cleaning fee kind of annoys me, but I still think if we hadn't cleaned as well as we did the inspector would have looked more closely and found more things to fine us on.  Realistically I was expecting to pay three times that.