Back in August of 2022 the estimated “2 weeks” to arrange our bounty of American belongings in our tiny Portugal house was a pipe dream. We had done a decent job of Medford packing Step One – sell, donate, gift, or keep and ship. Unfortunately we still had a lot of work to do with Olhão packing Step Two – unpacking and repacking everything in order to find what we needed and realistically had room for. We had moved in sight unseen so it was difficult to organize and plan with foresight. Boxes were everywhere, the hallway was a hazardous single file den of claustrophobia and it was hot as the dickens in August and September. I had moments of serious doubt that we could fit all of our boxes inside the Olhão house and also live there.

We worked on this project every day; it was tedious and exhausting and we were really crabby. After 2 weeks, we shoved the remaining unprocessed boxes into our storage room (aka the second bedroom) in a horribly complicated game of 3D Tetris in order to make room for our first guest, cousin John. When John left we took the boxes out of the storage room and continued our daily efforts. In all, it took us about 6 weeks. Andrew climbed up and down our ladder about a million times. We spent a ton of time updating our Google inventory sheet with the contents of repacked boxes because we knew that at some point another move would be in our future.

As we opened up every box there was good news: we found the contents of that one box we thought was missing, and bad news: we ended up with extra stuff that doesn’t belong to us including a plastic container of high end technical cords and someone’s wedding dress (ugh, I feel terrible about this one). Andrew contacted our international shipping company and provided descriptions and photographs of the surplus items, but unfortunately nothing came of that. We’ll write another post with my theory on how we received erroneous items and if we can successfully arrange a miracle and return the items to their rightful owners.

By the end of the repacking project we had more good news: only a handful of glass items were broken. We hadn’t lost any irreplaceable treasures! In the interim I have broken many more glasses and plates than the shippers did internationally – sorry about that plate sweet neighbor, hopefully you like the Christmas platter I picked as a replacement and the seasonal sweets included as an apology.

By the time we had repacked 70% of our belongings for storage, we had grown to despise all things cardboard, vowed to move later rather than sooner and forgot to provide an updated house tour. Over time we maximized our storage room to the best of our ability, purchased some pieces of furniture to help with organization, hung a couple of things on the wall (by paying someone else to drill deep holes in very thick cement walls), had an air conditioning unit installed, improved our hosting capabilities on the terrace, and did our best to make this little rented house in the south of Portugal a home. Without further ado…here it is, life in Olhão as it is now.

Tip: If you are planning a move, especially over long distances, consider hiring a local moving company to pack things like glassware and large or oddly shaped items. As we filled boxes we just set things aside for the movers in an ever growing pile and then scheduled them for a morning and afternoon of packing. Hiring a company in Medford for specific objects was a huge time saver and well worth the investment because almost everything arrived intact.