What to pack, what to store and how to not regret packing things you don’t need (and storing things you don’t want)

Preparing for expat life. You’re never quite so aware of how much stuff you have as when you’re trying to squeeze a flat’s worth of accumulated nonsense into a single, meagre baggage allowance. Are we right?

Living and working in a foreign country can be a humbling experience. Perspective-altering, yes. Career-enhancing, absolutely. Intimidating? You bet. Things that you never even considered being an issue might just prove to be. Catching a bus or opening a bank account. Trying to discern what ‘normal’ milk is in the supermarket, when faced with two dozen options (all written in a language you don’t yet understand).

Your new apartment is likely to be your little oasis of familiarity, so packing wisely for your new home-from-home is essential. Here are a few expat packing tips to help you on your way.

See also…

• Moving abroad: what we’d do differently if we could do it again
• 15 lifehack apps for expats in London
• Moving in together: 2 people, 1 flat, zero space
• Moving flat in London? 5 lifehack services that’ll help you out
• Self-storage with a difference: all you have to do is pack!

What to pack

A year might not sound like a long time, but trust us, it takes very little effort to set yourself up with pictures on the walls and things on the shelves, and stops your new home looking – and feeling – like a shell of a dwelling. After a long day dealing with aforementioned bus schedules or milk purchases, we can’t overstate how nice it is to come back to a place with little snippets of your familiar life.

Speak to most people who’ve lived abroad for any length of time and they’ll probably say this: don’t take stuff that you’re able to get where you’re going. What this means in practical terms depends on your location. James, a business consultant currently living in Atlanta, Georgia, found, after a tiny amount of research, that he’d be able to buy most day-to-day items more cheaply in the States, so he only took the things he had a particular attachment to.

‘Your new apartment is likely to be your little oasis of familiarity, so packing wisely for your new home-from-home is essential’

Meanwhile, Tom – a teacher at an international school in Thailand – realized that shoes in a Western-normal, but South-East Asian-unusual size 12 were hard to come by in his non-urban new neighbourhood (but, because of the strong expat community, foods like Marmite were readily available!) You’re not going to make all the right calls, but the more you know, the easier it will be.

Tom makes the good point that technology has rendered a lot of possessions dispensable: you can now store your DVDs on external hard-drives, swap books for eReaders and listen to music via services such as Spotify (checking first that it is available in your destination country, or working out how to set up a VPN).

Pack things that you have an emotional attachment to. Photographs and pictures are easy to squeeze in, take up almost no space and transform blank walls into friendly spaces. Small keepsakes that might jog memories of people and places also take up little room, but can have a transformative effect.

So, is it best to keep everything in storage back in the UK, then?

Look. Pep talk time. Moving abroad isn’t an excuse to sweep all your stuff into boxes, lock it up and forget about it. Who wants to return home to have to sift through a ton of junk they probably never needed in the first place?

Use this move as an opportunity to sort yourself out. Find a system that works for you. Marie Kondo, that Japanese guru of the uber-purge, advocates keeping items which only ‘spark joy’, and William Morris suggested the same thing a century prior when he advocated keeping nothing you ‘don’t know to be practical or believe to be beautiful’. Whichever phrasing you prefer, keep only the stuff that matters and be honest about it.

Once you’ve done this, make a proper inventory and put like with like. No one wants to sort through seventeen different boxes of documents looking for a copy of a university degree certificate or find twelve identical phone chargers. Noting what’s where can be a very clarifying process: you’ll automatically edit down when you see it all laid out in front of you.

Boxman, for example, organize themselves digitally, so you can easily keep track of what you’ve got stored, and in which box. As a London self-storage company with a difference, they’ll deliver the empty boxes to your house for you to fill, and then pick them up when you’re ready.

You won’t always get it right. As James notes, ‘There are some things that we left behind to pick up in the future. We’ve been here two years and we still haven’t picked them up.’ It’s inevitable that you’re going to find things you realise you don’t need when you return, but if you’ve sorted through everything to the best of your ability, should you find you do need someone to send over your favourite sweater or childhood teddy bear mid-contract, at least you’ll be able to direct them to its precise location.

Right. So sort and sort again. Any other expat packing tips for us?

Be prepared, be thorough and organized, but don’t beat yourself up about getting it absolutely right. As long as you know what you have and where it is, you’re onto a winner. As Tom wisely says, ‘You can’t prepare for all eventualities, so it’s often best to just jump in feet first and see what it’s like when you get there.’ Oh, and most importantly, enjoy it. You’ll figure out the milk thing soon enough.