The Sea Freight is here! The Sea Freight is here!

Praise the customs officials! The Sea Freight is here!

If you recall, we packed and shipped our items on 20Aug2014. We were quoted 2-4 weeks for air freight and 7-11 weeks for sea freight. The air freight took 4 to arrive, clear customs and be delivered. The sea freight took 15! Maybe they should adjust their estimates haha. The challenge is that customs required Dan's passport again to clear the sea freight. Not a huge issue except that we have travel plans that require his passport. I have to admit I think it made our customs clearance go a lot smoother given that we had a tight deadline.

All in all, we've survived just fine without our stuff but it sure is good to have it back. The major highlights for me are having our mattress back as well as our artwork/wall hangings. To me, those are what makes a place home, besides Dan of course. But, he was already here (old news haha)

The movers arrived and said they would unload the truck then unpack the boxes once everything got upstairs. The boxes just kept coming. There were four guys and they just kept bringing stuff in. Where did all of this come from?! How did it fit in our teeny tiny 827 sq foot apartment in San Francisco?! This apartment is almost twice the size and I don't have a clue where all of this is going to go! So after my initial freak out, I was ready to attempt the task of giving these items a "home" for the next couple years.

Slowly but surely the boxes came upstairs, the guys put our bed back together and moved the small amount of furniture we did bring to the appropriate rooms. It was a very busy day between getting my work done, the movers coming, unpacking, and dealing with an air conditioner that decided the day should start off with a lovely puddle on the living room floor (ha!)

Alas, most of the stuff is put away... aside from the electronics which I refuse to touch and I think Dan prefers it that way. With the unpacking almost finished, it surely must mean that it's time to repack. Seems to be the way of life, just a series of packing and unpacking. We're off to the US for four weeks of work, family time, holidays, visiting friends, wine tastings and New Years in San Francisco. The blog will be on hiatus during that time as we won't have any riveting Ghana stories to share with you.

Upon our return, hopefully we will have artwork up and everything in it's place and we can share some pictures of our Africa home. Best wishes, Happy Holidays and Happy New Year to you all! We'll talk to you in 2015!

Love,
Jen and Dan

Crafting Curtains

A few weeks ago, we went on the hunt for curtains for our apartment. While we knew the unit was unfurnished, it hadn't dawned on us that it did not come with window treatments either. The windows are fitted with a bar with brackets and little plastic tabs that slide in a track. The curtains that appropriately fit this setup would require the pleating and hooks (read as: not something we could just go to the store and buy pre-made).

Off we went to a home store, they quoted us an estimated cost and set up an appointment to come measure the windows. They came the following week and took the measurements on a Tuesday and said they would call with further information. No call on Wednesday or Thursday, and Friday we left for Lisbon. The next week Dan stopped in to check on the status and they said they had called me several times (I wouldn't know, I was enjoying Portugal and my Ghanaian phone doesn't have voicemail... haha). Regardless, Dan said that he was ready to pay and they mentioned that the cost per yard had gone up. It was now going to cost an extra 600 cedis for all the necessary window treatments (approx $225). This was quite irritating given that we had already received an estimate that we both thought they should honor... additionally, this is illegal in the States as a bait and switch. He left and said he needed to think about it.

The weekend arrived and we went to a clothing store that specializes in "Africa-wear". Dan's office wears African garb on Fridays and they've been giving him a hard time to get some. So we went to browse. While we didn't purchase any Africa-wear, what we didn't expect to find was tables upon tables of fabric by the yard available for purchase. Dan walked up, looked at me and said "so, can you make curtains?" Approximately, 10 days later, I had fitted all of the windows with curtains. Are they professional standard? Heck no. But they were about 1/4 of the price and in fun African fabrics rather than cheesy curtain fabric. And, maybe most importantly, they prevent people from seeing straight into our house in the evenings.

Here's some pictures of our new curtains:

Introducing: Aspect Court

Hooray! We finally have moved into our new apartment in Accra! Friday was a crazy busy day of meeting the air freight and furniture delivery people, unpacking everything, and attempting to find new homes for our things. Nothing was broken and there were only a few miscommunications. All in all, we have had a very productive couple of days and are looking forward to settling in and spending our next 23 months calling this space our home.

The apartment is 3 bedrooms, 2.5 baths. Quite the size upgrade from our 827 sq foot, 1 bed, 1 bath apartment in San Francisco, though quite similar in market value. There's a master bedroom with an en suite bath, a guest bedroom with a sizable bath across the hall (you hear that, potential guests?!?!), and a small third bedroom which has become my office and our workout space. There's a large great room that will be both our living and dining space and a decent sized balcony. Currently, the balcony only holds Dan's most prized purchase... the grill. We intend to purchase some outdoor furniture from a vendor on the side of the road at some point (I think there's a new blog post brewing there).

Here are some photos of the new space. I intentionally took these before anything got delivered as I wanted you to see the "blank canvas" if you will. Once we get things situated (read as: get all the dirty laundry washed and put away), I'll take others of the furnished space to share with you. Hope you enjoy these in the meantime!

Living/dining space looking out onto balcony

Kitchen... though I'm quite sure you didn't need a descriptor here.

Guest bedroom

Guest bathroom (hell-oooooo, soaker tub. Have I mentioned 

I love that corner ledge for a glass of wine? Just sayin')

The Woes of Packing

Today, I write from sunny Frankfurt, Germany during our layover en route to Accra. This week has been an emotional roller coaster for both of us. Saying goodbye to friends and coworkers, while also looking forward to our new adventures. I'd say about 60% of this week was consumed with packing our belongings... and mind you we both worked all week so that was pretty much every available moment we had.

The challenge with this move was definitely the categorizing of our things. Our apartment in San Francisco was only 827 square feet, surely not large enough to have acquired an overwhelming amount of paraphernalia. While I don't think anyone finds moving easy or enjoyable, it's much smoother to be able to tell movers to pack everything and take it form Point A to Point B... all of it... one place.

Our challenge was a bit more complicated. We had the stuff that we wanted to have immediately which went in "sizable" checked bags. Mostly, Dan's work clothes, a transformer to change voltage, clothes for me, bathroom products, the items we needed until the last possible moment, etc. (See photo below for definition of sizable and thank goodness we are able to expense our baggage fees.)

After we outlined the "must-have-right-away's" we moved on to classifying the rest of our items. They had to go into one of the three remaining categories:

• Air Freight (expected arrival 2-4 weeks, not including customs clearance)
• Overseas Freight (expected arrival 7-11 weeks, not including customs clearance)
• Storage in San Francisco (see you in two years)

We decided that the easiest way to accomplish this was to assign each category an area of our apartment and start moving the applicable personal effects to the correct area. This task, while daunting and quite time consuming, actually helped the movers immensely.

Eventually, everything was packed and our little downtown apartment was sad and empty. We only had one small miscommunication with the movers. There was one piece of luggage intended to be checked baggage that was not appropriately located and it was taken as Overseas Freight... so we'll be getting that one a little later than we intended. Oh well. Better late than never.

We will keep you posted as the goodies arrive and hope to have an apartment that feels like our home again by Turkey Time. Off to board our connection to Accra!