Last Visit before Move! What should I prioritize!

On food allergies in the UK: all the major supermarkets have their own in house "free from" lines. You might not find them in smaller stores, but they are in all the larger stores. The larger stores will also carry larger GF and egg/dairy/soy free brands. I've done just fine with my celiac disease over there. I know you've got a few more ingredients to worry about, but many of the free from foods are pretty much free from all of the allergens you listed. They seem to like to conquer all of them with one product. Holland and Barrett are great for allergy free foods, as is Planet Organic, and obviously Whole Foods. Your biggest challenge is likely to be dining out, as it won't be too difficult to cook at home without those main allergens.

Anyhow, I feel your pain and I know it's overwhelming at first. I have some stranger food allergies on top of my gluten issues (all melons, pistachios, cashews, corn products, and certain raw vegetables) and it can be difficult to deal with sometimes, but after 5 years of sweating off all that stuff it's become second nature.  You'll adapt quickly, I'm sure.

Hi Wren Black -

I think your five week experiment will really help your learning curve. 

I made a very concerted effort during our last visit to suss out daily living stuff that was important to us.  So I think you start there.  You already mentioned toiletries and so take it from there.  Price out stuff in supermarkets and stores that are comparable to what you use here.  Make a list like you would for shopping in the US and see how much in sterling it costs you.  You are fortunate to have your MIL to help you with answering questions.  There are no women in my husband's family (locally) so I'm stuck with looking for answers from my husband and his brother.  And they pretty much would live like bears with furniture if allowed.  :p   

Window shop for furniture and home furnishings.  Have your MIL teach you about duvets and English bedding differences.  You say you are a minimalist now but when you resettle you'll want to 'nest'.  So what are your 'must haves' or things that you feel are important to make a house a home?  I'm weird about lamps and lighting.  I think the right lighting makes a cozy home.  So I'm always window shopping lamps and light fixtures when I'm over there.  I want to learn what my potential choices are.

Do the laundry.  Get your MIL to teach you how to use an English machine (they are different).  Learn about the products because they are named differently than in the US.  Also try some house-cleaning while over there if your MIL will allow it. 

Check out local transport and how much it costs.  Try navigating yourself around on your own once you have your bearings a bit.  Take a phone to call home in case you get lost.  :p

There are no women in my husband's family (locally) so I'm stuck with looking for answers from my husband and his brother.  And they pretty much would live like bears with furniture if allowed.  :p   

Window shop for furniture and home furnishings.  Have your MIL teach you about duvets and English bedding differences.  You say you are a minimalist now but when you resettle you'll want to 'nest'.  So what are your 'must haves' or things that you feel are important to make a house a home?  I'm weird about lamps and lighting.  I think the right lighting makes a cozy home.  So I'm always window shopping lamps and light fixtures when I'm over there.  I want to learn what my potential choices are.

Do the laundry.  Get your MIL to teach you how to use an English machine (they are different).  Learn about the products because they are named differently than in the US.  Also try some house-cleaning while over there if your MIL will allow it. 

Check out local transport and how much it costs.  Try navigating yourself around on your own once you have your bearings a bit.  Take a phone to call home in case you get lost.  :p

Wow. I guess in past visits I have done enough of all of this that I am actually very comfortable with most of it already.  I even clean regularly on our visits because my husband has really severe allergies to dust, dust mites, pet dander, mold and other indoor things. My MIL loves when I show up because even though she's tidy, she admits she's super lazy when it comes to really cleaning, lol, and I have her house shining within 48 hours and keep it that way!

I make my own cleaning and personal care products, mostly, so that shouldn't be a problem. I only worry I won't be able to find a laundry detergent that meets my extremely environmentally conscious standards.

I don't know how I'll do with transport, though. Of course we are okay with walking in town, as we do that here, but in the past we always rented or borrowed a car, and this time I will only be renting for about 2 weeks to take our little trips, then I will have to suss out transport after that.

As far as the duvet thing goes, we've been using them for years already, and we have a really nice bed that I literally saved my pennies for years ago, so we will be keeping it, buying a new mattress and maybe sheets before we go [it's a queen]. The kids' bed is an old fashioned double [family heirloom], so we will likely keep their furniture as well. 

I will be measuring rooms everywhere I go, if friends and family will let me, to decide if there's any other furniture we'd like to purge. Right now we are planning on keeping most of our everyday furniture, and all of our antiques and heirlooms [that said, we really don't have that much and it's all practical]. I have shipping costs in the budget because we did the math and over time, even if we replaced only the essentials and only with cheaper versions, it would cost as much or more. I have very nice furniture and most of what I'm keeping was handmade or refinished for me, is a family heirloom and antique, or I bought because I couldn't live without it. In our case it doesn't really pay to start over.

There will be some things I'm going to have to replace.  A tea/coffee/cappuccino machine, my hair drier, perhaps my vacuum and a few other electronics which I plan on pricing out. My couch is too small for my family and even though it's nice I found it on the side of the road and didn't pick it out myself and so it's not my taste. I plan on looking for one that converts into a bed if I can. Any suggestions on the above would be much appreciated!

And it's funny you mentioned lamps because those are one of those things I've carefully collected over the years [I think they were almost all given to me, but I love them and they are my taste].  I did a quick search online and I believe I can rewire all of them.  I've rewired a lamp before and it isn't complicated, so I'm hoping I can go searching for the wiring kits this trip and bring them back.  At £10 a pop, it's worth it to me. I'm sure others have done this? Then I can rewire them before the movers come and they will be ready to go. I bet some of my artist friends here would love to have all of my old lamp wires, too.

I guess I will mostly be trying to figure out what our daily life will look like. We will be homeschooling our five year old during the trip [we have to pull her out of school for a few weeks because she will miss too much].  Perhaps paying attention to my Niece and Nephew's schedules will give us an idea of what to expect on that front?

I can't help you with the kid stuff.  Mine is grown, living 200 miles from here in his first apartment and with his first real job.  

A lot of people use Argos for their kitchen electricals.  Then there's Debenhams and of course amazon.co.uk.  Nespresso seems to be a preferred brand of coffee maker.  I was excited to see a Breville store once! Even if it weren't for the problem of electrical conversion in the two countries, I believe it's better to just replace once there.  Who knows how much counter space/storage you will have?  I remember purging soooooooo much kitchen stuff when we moved from our larger house to this smaller one.  And that was just moving across town.  I still had to get rid of stuff once I got here.  

My brother in law has a little red canister vacuum with a smiley face on it called "Henry".  I like it a lot.  I'm told the green ones are called "Henrietta" if you have a preference.  And of course - it's Britain.  Buy a Dyson (even if they aren't made there anymore).  :p

I started a thread here on yankee a few months ago about doing the laundry.  You might hunt it up.  I got lots of good advice.

Couches?  Marks and Spencer?  Or mail order with made.com ?  I could look at that website for hours.  

Measuring rooms would be a good idea.  I use to think I was going to haul over our furniture.  I've since changed my mind.  I've got two sitting room suites of custom ordered upholstered furniture and I'm sure neither would fit in any UK front room.  And the style isn't suited either.    I still own all the hand made oak tables, chairs, china closets, etcetera from my first marriage.  They are massively too big.  On the other hand, I've a second hand pie safe that my sister and I refinished.  It's a right piece of junk but turned out cute. I'll have a hard time parting with it.  I think I'll leave it with her.  Two Ethan Allen bedroom suites?  Selling them.  They are 'vintage' now.  

I have a tiny drop leaf dining table that was my grandmothers.  My grandparents had a mobile home franchise pre-WWII and the table came out of the home they lived in on the lot.  It's REALLY not a high end piece of furniture but it's very unique.  It's about the only piece of furniture I would consider taking.

Not taking my lamps.  Boooooooo.

Besides the expense (for us) of hauling over too much stuff, I've concluded it's not for us.  For one thing, my own parents are hoarders.  Not the filthy kind.  But the can't part with anything kind.  And the 'collectibles' kind.  I don't know if you've ever seen a 60 year old pile of that sort of thing but - well it's sort of incredible.  

And, I had an "a-ha" moment a couple of years ago.  My husband had a serious incident with his health and it scared me pretty badly.  I didn't know how he was going to come out of it.  The resulting seizures from his malignant blood pressure left him with what the doctors said was PRES - temporary brain damage.  I was just sure he was going to be one of the tiny percentage of people who never came out of it.  Thankfully I was wrong.  But in thinking about our plans to go home and wondering if he would ever get to go home again - well it kind of put all the material possessions into a different perspective.  

So there will probably be one (maybe two) U-cubes going back.  Mostly full of his books and action figures.  Some Christmas ornaments.  My Staffordshire dogs.  A couple of boxes of kitchen doo-dads (no pots, pans or dishes).  What the hell.  It's only stuff.  

 

I started a thread here on yankee a few months ago about doing the laundry.  You might hunt it up.  I got lots of good advice.

Couches?  Marks and Spencer?  Or mail order with made.com ?  I could look at that website for hours.  

Measuring rooms would be a good idea.  I use to think I was going to haul over our furniture.  I've since changed my mind.  I've got two sitting room suites of custom ordered upholstered furniture and I'm sure neither would fit in any UK front room.  And the style isn't suited either.    I still own all the hand made oak tables, chairs, china closets, etcetera from my first marriage.  They are massively too big.  On the other hand, I've a second hand pie safe that my sister and I refinished.  It's a right piece of junk but turned out cute. I'll have a hard time parting with it.  I think I'll leave it with her.  Two Ethan Allen bedroom suites?  Selling them.  They are 'vintage' now.  

I have a tiny drop leaf dining table that was my grandmothers.  My grandparents had a mobile home franchise pre-WWII and the table came out of the home they lived in on the lot.  It's REALLY not a high end piece of furniture but it's very unique.  It's about the only piece of furniture I would consider taking.

Not taking my lamps.  Boooooooo.

Besides the expense (for us) of hauling over too much stuff, I've concluded it's not for us.  For one thing, my own parents are hoarders.  Not the filthy kind.  But the can't part with anything kind.  And the 'collectibles' kind.  I don't know if you've ever seen a 60 year old pile of that sort of thing but - well it's sort of incredible.  

...thinking about our plans to go home and wondering if he would ever get to go home again - well it kind of put all the material possessions into a different perspective.  

So there will probably be one (maybe two) U-cubes going back.  Mostly full of his books and action figures.  Some Christmas ornaments.  My Staffordshire dogs.  A couple of boxes of kitchen doo-dads (no pots, pans or dishes).  What the hell.  It's only stuff.  

I'm glad you hubby is okay and that  he'll get to go home! I have been thinking the same about the stuff lately, but we've already done so much purging--we are down to comfortably living in a 2 bedroom apartment--that I feel like we can reasonably keep most of what we still have. I mentioned to my husband about just starting over, and he encouraged me to do the numbers first.  After I 'replaced' our things [very sparsely, I might add] with almost the cheapest versions I could find online [in the UK], it was so close to the shipping costs that it wasn't worth it.

For me it's the anxiety factor. It's going to be hard enough for me to move to a foreign country with the level of anxiety and OCD I have.  It will help with the transition for me to be able to unpack and mostly have everything we need all at once. In fact, by the time our things arrive, I will probably have already purchased the 'replacement' gadgets we need [heck, I might even do some of that THIS chirstmas while we are there if there are deals, and leave it with my MIL].  I think my husband recognized that it will be good for me to almost immediately feel 'at home' inside our house, so he wants to stick with the shipping plan.

Luckily we don't have 'huge American style furniture' anyway. The biggest thing is our bed, and even though it's a queen and 4 poster, it's very conservative in size and style, and breaks down into many pieces for ease of moving. This was another reason for purging 2/3s of our wardrobes Less to store in the bedroom leaves more room for what's important! Sunday morning usually means all five of us in that bed [including our Greyound].

As we hate our couch and our leather footstools are shredded, we will only be keeping 2 small chairs, a small shelf, and an antique trunk full of all of my sewing things from the living room.  I am still on the fence about my in-table sewing machine, even though it's not large, because I have a newer table top one. We will have a transformer because we have expensive kitchen gear that would cost too much to replace. We are only replacing things that heat up in there, and I can use the transformer for my sewing machine and serger when needed.

Even our dining room table and chairs are pretty conservative in size and very simple in style. I don't imagine ever needing or wanting new ones, when wood can always be refinished. Especially since I will be working there, it's where we do crafts, and we always sit down to dinner to eat etc etc.

There are, of course, a few more pieces of furniture on the chopping block.  The kids have a large IKEA 16 block bookshelf that I'd rather replace with something that uses space more efficiently, so that will go. And I have a large antique country store shelf that I use as a sideboard and storage for all my dishes, which might get the ax if I think it won't fit.  Measuring as many houses as I can will be key, I think.