The big news of the week is that our truck full of stuff from Framingham has arrived in San Miguel de Allende. To be honest, some of the boxes and bins looked they had been involved in a roll-over crash, and there are random scratches here and there on the furniture. You get what you pay for, I guess.
Several people have asked about the details of a cross-border move, so here they are. Originally we weren’t planning on moving anything, except what we could fit into our Honda Pilot (which is not that much when you have 5 people, our regular luggage, and the cat). I don’t know what we thought we were going to do with it all if we didn’t move it, because we didn’t have time to organize and sell it. We ended up donating a ton, because the tax deduction results in more money in our pockets than a yard sale. Some of our furniture we left for the new renters to use.
A few months ago, we saw a post on the local SMA Yahoo group – someone was driving an almost-empty 16-foot truck from the Boston area to Laredo, Texas, in order to tow a car to San Miguel. He was willing to drive the truck, but we would basically be paying for it (the truck, but not the car trailer). When we headed from MX to MA, we stopped in Laredo to meet the customs agent who would process our stuff across the border if we decided to go forward with this plan. He seemed like a good guy, and at that point everyone was excited about packing up their treasures and bringing them to San Miguel.
Over the next couple of weeks, we realized that we couldn’t meet the empty-truck driver’s timeline, and we didn’t think we could get the proper paperwork from the consulate to move the stuff across the border without paying the 17% duty, so we told the empty-truck driver that it wasn’t going to work. When we went to the consulate for our visas, our favorite consulate employee – Concepción – told us that we could get the necessary paperwork, so we started thinking about Plan B. Maybe WE could rent a truck and drive it to Laredo.
Seems like a crazy idea, right? Ben driving a truck from MA to TX, with me driving the Pilot. Well, we’ve been known to do crazy stuff, and everyone already had their favorite items picked out. Not to mention that the cost of the stuff we could fit into a 16-foot truck was way more valuable than the cost to transport it. On the way back from a trip to Vermont, Aliya and I saw an older lady driving a Penske moving truck with a dog on her lap, so we figured it couldn’t be that hard. ONWARD!
As we were packing boxes I had to number each one and make a list in Spanish – Box #1 – ropa (clothes), Box #2 – cosas para la cosina (kitchen stuff), Box #3 – juguetes (toys), Box #4 – libros (books). For all electronic items I had to note the make, model, and serial number on the list. None of the items could be new, and we could not transport any consumables like paper towels or food, and no guns, etc. When the list was complete, we had to write a letter in Spanish and take 4 copies of the letter, list, my passport and visa to the consulate. Concepción took care of us right away, and gave us 3 signed and sealed copies of our “menaje de casa.” I think the cost was somewhere around $125-$150.
Some of the boxes on the list did not fit onto the truck, but apparently that’s ok – we just couldn’t have anything in the truck that was not on the list. Concepción pointed out that when Ben gets his new visa (which was separate from ours – another story), we could get ANOTHER menaje de casa in his name to move the rest of our stuff. I’m not sure I’d want to go through it again, but maybe in time I’ll forget how hard it was and decide to empty the garage.
Once we arrived in Laredo we handed the contents of the truck over to a customs agent and hoped for the best. I had gotten prices for the Laredo-to-San Miguel leg of the trip which ranged from $2500 to $8900…you can probably guess which one we chose. The cost of the 16-foot Penske truck for 10 days, including gas and tolls, was around $2000. We paid our extremely motivational movers/Tetris experts $500 to load the truck in Framingham. So for a little over $5000 total we moved a sofa and loveseat, a chair-and-a-half, a reclaimed wood cabinet, an old sewing machine cabinet, Norah’s dresser and bed with 12 drawers underneath (a beast), Adlani’s bed, our king-sized bed, 2 TVs (one big), a DVD player, 4 big rugs, some miscellaneous artwork, and 113 boxes of random possessions. We also had some new things and consumables (including 4 containers of maple syrup), but those rode in the Pilot.
Now that our things are here I feel like we might actually settle in at some point. We still need a few pieces of furniture, but mostly we need some storage pieces for our kitchen stuff. It’s pretty easy and economical to have that kind of furniture built here, but meanwhile I need to get Ben to stop unpacking boxes of things that I have no place to put. Wish me luck.
