The next step was to plan my resignation. Obviously, this came as a shock to my employers because I’m known for liking a fixed work routine. Initially, I had hoped they would allow me to work remotely from anywhere in the world (I’m a travel agent) so I could be flexible. Their answer was “no” and this created a small setback for us, but we decided to continue with our plans anyway.
In the meantime, Brett was busy liquidating all our worldly possessions and bit by bit everything was sold off. We made use of a Google spreadsheet on Google drive and shared this with potential buyers and friends so they could reserve the goods they wanted on a “live list”. This worked extremely well and the bidding became quite competitive as new items were added to the list over time.
It’s startling to realize how little one’s household items are actually worth when it comes to selling them. It was interesting to note the items we thought were valuable were often of little interest to buyers and yet the small arbitrary bric-a-brac things people were almost fighting over.
Luckily we had lots of supportive friends and colleagues who bought almost everything from us. The rest was sold on Gumtree but we found this to be much less effective – too many timewasters and “tyre kickers”.
Some personal effects can’t be sold so these things had to be shipped. After searching online for many quotes, we found an international shipping company (Econotrans) and an excellent packaging/crating company (Rebul) in Cape Town who supplied us custom built shipping crates. Before we found Rebul we considered building our own plywood crates. Rebul crates worked out much cheaper and an added bonus was that no fumigation certificate was required as their shipping crates are constructed from a very strong honeycomb-type cardboard.
At the time of writing this post, the container is on the ship cruising past the Canary Islands en route to Rotterdam. Hopefully, we will receive our personal effects within the next two weeks!