Forberedelser

Thinking of our move to Norway, whether it takes place in December 2008 or June 2009, is pretty overwhelming. I'm trying to take some steps this summer to get ready:

• The exterior of our house is now painted! Yay! It looks so much better, and for the first time I'm not embarrassed to live here. The guy did a great job. It cost around $2200, which seemed incredibly reasonable for a 1600 square foot house (plus 400 square foot attached garage)
• We have hired a finish carpenter to do some work in the house. The bathroom and master bedroom doors are missing trim, and we need to have the trim around the kitchen floor replaced, and a bunch of other little jobs. These are things that drive us crazy on a subliminal level, and if they're not done I think it will turn off potential buyers. Of course no one (but us) will notice them when they are done, but they really need to be done any way. It will cost about $600
• We have hired an electrician to take care of a whole bunch of nagging little things--including the power strip that the former owners have mounted on an exterior wall! This long list of little electrical things is a bigger job, about $1100
• We have signed up for our neighborhood's big summer yard sale from 25-27 July. It will give us the opportunity to get rid of a bunch of things that we don't want to take with us. We're not planning on storing anything here in the US, so we either take it with us or sell/donate it. That can be a bit overwhelming. Even though I'm a minimalist, we've still accumulated a lot. And this neighborhood sale comes a bit too early--we can't get rid of everything, since we still have 6-12 more months to live here.

Unfortunately, there are even more things that I haven't begun to take concrete action on, even though I've been fretting about them for months:

• Figuring out how to ship belongings overseas. We'd like to get a quote for a standard container of some sort and then just purge our belongings down to what fits, but that doesn't seem to be the way shipping companies work. When I tried to get information they kept asking me "how many rooms" we would be shipping, which seems ridiculous. Doesn't it kind of depend on how big the rooms are and how full of stuff they are?! Give me the height, width, depth, and weight, and I'm okay, but this "room" stuff is totally frustrating.
• Figuring out how to transfer financial assets. Obviously I'm going to let my retirement account sit, but if we get any money out of selling our house (please, please) we'd like to take that money with us. I need to find out any tax implications.
• I think we also need to get some interior painting done in the house to spruce it up a bit before selling. Not sure if it's worth the time/energy expenditure to do it ourselves, or whether we should hire someone.