tl;dr: the managed seller auction pickup process is so easy, we could have left the house for the day.

2024 tl;dr: this is a factual account of how selling our stuff went, so there’s nothing more to add, really. For all that we might have edited our belongings differently with the benefit of clearer foresight, we remain happy with the results from MaxSold and recommend them to people looking for their kind of service. Read on for the blow-by-blow of how it all went.

As discussed awhile back, we sold essentially everything we owned before leaving for Portugal. Our belongings were divvied into lots, and those lots were listed on a website to be auctioned for approximately two weeks. (You can read more about it at that link above to Part 8 of Moving to Portugal.) Once the auctions were completed, auction winners were slotted into times on Saturday to pick up their plunder. Three ladies from a company called MaxSold showed up about 30 minutes prior to the first scheduled pickup. (We do not have an affiliate relationship with them, they just happen to be who we used.) They went through the house making notes about where the various lots were and if any buyer had several lots to pickup (many did). They put out an A-frame with a big “MaxSold” logo on it, and divvied up responsibilities. One mostly handled the upstairs lots, another the downstairs ones, and the third the ones in the garage. Both of the downstairs ladies took turns checking IDs and managing the number of people in the house at any given time (for COVID protection). We helped a bit, but were pretty superfluous and even left before it was completely done. When we returned, we found our house tidy and locked up tight. The MaxSold team was professional and courteous.

There were a few minor issues:

• One person showed up for pickup about an hour early and sat in her truck out front until it was time. (Turns out she’d been given the wrong time by MaxSold, a minor problem and no one fussed.)
• One person picked up half her items and then lost track of the fact that she had more and left. We figured this out about an hour before the pickup window closed and MaxSold called her. She came back that evening (at our convenience) and picked up the rest.
• People came when they came, and it rarely had much to do with the time they were scheduled to arrive. This made for some VERY BUSY and intense periods when we had people getting their items while others waited in the chill because we had to restrict the number of people inside at any time.

One thing I can’t stress enough about this process: you need to be ok with your belongings going for fire-sale-level prices. It doesn’t matter that you paid $3k for that couch from Pottery Barn, and maybe could have sold it on craigslist for $200. It sold at auction for $30. (Or even $1.) MaxSold makes it clear that part of their mission is to re-home rather than send to landfill, and you need to make that part of your acceptance process. This is probably the same emotional process needed for a garage sale, but it’s definitely true here. People hunting through these auctions are looking for steals, not for reasonably priced merchandise.

Now for the Plus!!! part of this post.

The first auction went so well, we went ahead and signed up for a 2nd auction, but this time managed by us, to get rid of the things we had to keep on hand while we waited for the house sale to close. This selection mainly included the bare necessities of furniture and sundries that we needed to keep living during the month or so that our house sold and then closed on the paperwork. So, a bed frame, a few chairs, television etc… We negotiated (that is, we asked and MaxSold gave us) a flat 30% fee on the auction.

Hard numbers: The first auction was 80+ lots and netted us just under $1000, the second auction was 28 lots and netted us just under $900.

Unsurprisingly, you don’t “make” money from MaxSold, but doing the lots yourself nets you more. That said, $700 for someone else to put together so many lots and then manage the pickup process was worth every penny. If I were to do it all over, I would have done smaller auctions, managed by us, over 4-6 weeks. The numbers likely would have looked more like:

Three auctions $3600
no fee
commission $1080
total $2520
actual $1846
potential increase $673

Back to 2024: And with this, we conclude our re-visiting of how we got to Portugal. Next post is entirely new content! Here’s a pictorial tease.

One of the people in our area (henceforth known as RV) in the Americans and Friends in Portugal facebook group (henceforth AFiP) group mentioned they were using MaxSold to sell everything in their house. I was intrigued and immediately had a look at their website. It looked intriguing, potentially even the answer to the ancient questions, “how do 2 people in a 4 bedroom house get rid of everything they own without going insane?” (Ok, back then it was a cave, not a house, but still . . .) I asked RV a few questions about how it worked in reality, which he was great about answering. He also told the group real numbers, which is always helpful. We were very excited about this being the answer. But . . . I’m a worrier and we were still in a place of needing to “get value” from our stuff. (I did think I was more past it than it turned out I was, I confess.) A lot of our more valuable things are jewelry and “investment” art. When I looked at auctions and zeroed in on those things I was shocked at how little people were paying for those kinds of items. This bummed us both out, and we started going back on forth.

There’s nothing to add to the following commentary; Lisa did a great job of telling this part of the story. The retrospective thought boils down to this – we had no idea what we actually should have kept, and there’s a good chance that you’ll have a similar problem. We did not know how our life would pan out in Portugal, that we’d have a large community of friends and a spacious apartment suitable for entertaining when we want. We thought we were going to be living in a spartan place which just served as a home base while we were out gallivanting across the continent. As such, we shed a lot of stuff that we might have made good use of if we had it. And have ended up replacing in our new life. If you have any such uncertainty in your own travel plans, we suggest you go bigger on a storage unit in the US than you may originally have planned, with the expectation that you’ll be editing the contents down as time goes by. Either that, or bring more than you otherwise might have, with the intention of divesting here when your lifestyle comes into focus. Anything you can do in the US can also be done in Portugal, although of course you will have paid to transport those things you don’t end up keeping, and like so many other things it will be more trouble to manage the process in Portuguese.

What really got us worried was that we had generated a pretty tight timeline for getting rid of everything before painting the entire interior and that was only the week before we were going to list the house. Here’s the thing: MaxSold will try to sell anything we ask them to (subject to their policies, of course), but are not responsible for the disposition of anything not sold. That would be up to us. In a worst-case scenario, we could end up having to rent a truck and making multiple runs to the dump mere days before the house gets painted, having paid a fee for the service.**

So we made three decisions. One was to work with an Art Seller to sell our signed art (mostly Mangelsen and a bit of McKnight), another was to find a local jeweler and have my collection appraised. The final decision was to do a kind of test run for selling things on our own.

The garage seemed like a good place to start. We had a variety of items, none were needed, and many were good value we could offer for low prices. We spent a weekend photographing items and making listings on Facebook Marketplace and the Seattle-specific Craigslist. We then spent a week monitoring email and Messenger answering questions and making appointments for people to get the stuff. Out of 25 listings for tools, games, luggage, and various household items, we sold about half. To sell those 12, we had to speak to more than 100 people and made about 30 appointments. The number of people who simply did not show was absurd. In the end we had one absolutely superb buyer (who ended up taking items we were going to sell in the future because she mentioned a need and we could do the transaction) and several great (pleasant, easy) transactions, and many weird/ odd/ just fine interactions. It was not an encouraging ratio.

It was exhausting. Absolutely not worth it for us to go that route.

With a quick email I was in touch with a rep at MaxSold who went over the two ways to work with them:

1. You do much of the work to create “lots”, take pictures, and write up the descriptions.
2. You pay them $700 to do that work for you.

Either way, they post the lots online, handle the auction technology (accepting bids and getting payments from buyers), and are onsite for the scheduled pickups by buyers. We chose to also pay to have a Move Manager do much of the work for us, feeling that we didn’t know how to best organize the lots. We were able to schedule a date for them to come catalog the items about two weeks after the first contact, and were sent several helpful videos about how to get ready for the cataloging.

Getting ready for the cataloging is a matter of:

• Getting rid — via recycle, landfill, or donation — of as much as possible. This is a crucial step because they do not move furniture or open boxes, and creating lots takes up a lot of room. You need as much clear space as possible.
• Putting like with like. Gather all your lamps, pottery, linens, books, office supplies, tools, whatever, into one place. Your manager may not think its a good idea to make a single lot of them all, but its the best way to start. Think like a buyer and put your stuff in groups with a value of more than $35. I used each shelf of my china cabinet to create a lot for my dish set, another for my collectible figurines, and the third shelf for a collection I put together of some fine crystal, Swarovski crystal animals, and a dried flower arrangement.
• Moving all personal items away from things being sold. This is mostly to make it easier for the catalogers. They use tape to mark where a lot is stored (making pick up day easier), so you need to keep your personal stuff separate, especially valuables.
• Cleaning out drawers and shelves. Dresser drawers need to be empty, the catalogers will need pictures of everything — they open drawers, open doors, and take pictures of it all.
• Sorting low and high value items. Low value items are best when isolated and grouped together with a high value item or two added in for interest.
• Creating a mindset in which you are OK with all of this stuff leaving your house.

That last point is tough, more so than you might be able to imagine at the outset. We knew for months before that we were selling everything, but in the two weeks between cataloguing and pickup we were irritated, sad, and relieved in turn. What we didn’t think about before the lots were created was that we had to live in the house for a few weeks afterwards. We made it a day, then got a few boxes and put whole lots from the kitchen area into a single box at a time so they’d be easy to locate afterwards. Looking at the things from our life grouped together was a bit of a bummer, memories captured in the tchotckes, pictures . . . even the dishware. It’s true that not all of the emotions that came up were negative — this is where the feeling relieved comment comes into play. But most of us do our best to avoid negative emotions, and cleaning out an entire house is pretty much guaranteed to bring it all right into our lives.

In my next post I’ll tell you how it went. Here’s my tease – it went pretty well.

[Editor’s (aka husband’s) note: we don’t have an affiliate link with Maxsold. We don’t own stock. We are, in fact, bad business-people, but this is just our story, nothing else.]

*Note that Maxsold is not everywhere, so it may not be the answer for you.
**This is very much about not adding to landfill for us, not making money. A little is getting value, yes, but mostly its about not adding to landfill.

We’ve decided that we would like to move to Portugal. Great! Now how exactly do we make it happen and when will we be able to afford it. We work some things out with our financial advisor (again!) and have a solid plan that, according to some extensive modeling, seems to be 80%+ likely to result in a successful post-work life, starting at Lisa’s 59-and-one-half birthday, which is when we gain access to her 401(k)1. (Verb tenses are tricky when you’re mildly updating a 3-year-old blog post. Mostly I’m just leaving them alone; sorry if it ever gets confusing.) That puts retirement day, or “R Day”, in early 2027. So, ok, solid plan. The only problem with it is, for both of us, once we started thinking in concrete terms about moving to Europe, we really lost patience quickly with the idea of waiting so long. (The history of us shifting from “let’s be very deliberate and consider all our options” immediately into “LFG!!!!!” is a long one. The last house we bought teetered from “it’s a slow day, let’s check out one of the new neighborhoods in the area” to “BUY BUY BUY!” a la the Duke Brothers in about an hour.) I2027 is already far earlier than we ever expected to do it, but that doesn’t change the fact that we had the bit in our teeth and we didn’t want to spit it. We kept noodling on plans. We figured out how to maximize our savings with a larger balance outside of our retirement vehicles (401k, IRAs of all kinds…) because we could basically “buy” months of early retirement by being able to pay cash on the barrel. In other words, if our monthly budget in retirement is $7000, every $7000 in liquid, non-retirement savings is a month we can chop off of the wait to move. (This simplifies a lot of things, like moving and initial expenses, maintaining emergency savings and so on, but you get the idea.) We figure that the process of time passing + increased saving money over that time will meet at about 18 months or so of extra retirement. Awesome! We’ve moved “R” day all the way up to late 2025. That’s way closer, right?

(We won’t keep saying this over and over, but we are not financial advisors. This is a description of how the thinking worked for us. If you need a guy, we still like ours.)

Welllll yes, it is way closer, but still. The small-child portions of our brains were still very much “but I wanna go nooooooww!”, and we weren’t really fighting all that hard to hush those voices. There are some personal considerations that we won’t get into just now, but Lisa in particular has carried a very difficult situation in her life for many years now, and she’s done so with tremendous grace, but retiring and/or moving would cut the situation cleanly out of her life, and I’ve wanted that for her very badly for a long time now. If you’ve guessed what came next, congratulations – again, not rocket science, but we had to work through these things at our own pace.

The home we live in has been a question mark for some time now. Some people in the retirement-advice game suggest that you make your home a rental property while you’re gone, as your destination country really likes to see an ongoing income stream even if you’re retired. Also, it means you’ve got a home to come back to. On the other hand… we’ve been assiduously paying down our mortgage for the 11 years we’ve lived here and owe less than $200k. Have I ever mentioned that we live in a suburb of Seattle, Washington? (Alarm bells just started going off for some people.) This is one of the absolute hottest real estate markets in the country lately; this was written in June of 2021 and is publishing in October of 2021 – hello, readers from the future! (Hi, me! I’m a reader in the future! What the hell, let’s keep it going – this is publishing in June of 2024; hello readers from the further future!) The housing situation tweaks my liberal guilt, as it makes housing less and less affordable for people who need it. However, it can’t be helped that it’s also insanely good if you’re a seller. (The best we could do is try to sell to, you know, actual humans who need a home rather than to an equity pool that is merely expanding their rental portfolio; we managed to pull that one off, thank goodness.) Normally we ignore news about the housing market in Seattle, because we’ve liked living where we do; this means any thought of selling our house has always been immediately followed with “yeah but then we have to buy back into the market, so that’s basically a wash.” Sure… but what if we aren’t buying back in? What if we take the money and, almost literally, run? We re-do some numbers once again(!) only with the infusion of our net gains on our house and, suddenly, we have incredible freedom in picking our “R” day – it has gone from ‘maybe someday’, to ‘very plausible in the future’, and all the way to ‘not quite pack our bags, but definitely start shopping for luggage.’ We come to settle on May of 2022(!!!) as our target. This is incredible! At this point, we tell ourselves, the only thing we aren’t sure about is whether we really are going to Portugal.

We had booked a “scouting trip” to Portugal for October of 2021, hoping that the pandemic would have loosened up enough by then that vacation travel would be allowed again. We have a nice itinerary picked out, where we’ll spend some time in a few different likely spots to settle into. And let’s just settle this now – yes, you’re right, that’s not really enough time to be sure about a place to live in. For sure. However, you are required to have a one-year lease already signed when you apply for your visa, so you’ve got to pick some-where. Some people decide to make several trips before picking a place, which is a perfectly reasonable way to do things. What Lisa and I decided was that we wouldn’t be moving with a lot of household goods; we’d be renting a furnished apartment. And, well, we can put up with ANYTHING for a year. So, we were going to do our best to find a landing spot, land there, and if we hate it we have twelve months to ramble (a ha!) around the country and find where we want to go next. It’s just no skin off of our noses. So, good? Good. Trip in October, come back and have a “come to Jesus” meeting on November 1st; a household meeting (I mean, there’s just the two of us, but whatever) where we look each other in the eye and say “yea or nay” to this whole expedition. Assuming “yea”, we’d then have from November to May to get our affairs in order. No problem-o. (We also come up with this really lovely plan to sail across the Atlantic to begin our new life; it started out as a way to make the best of not having enough airline miles for another international flight so soon after October, and also to avoid showing up to our new home jet-lagged. The more we ponder it the more we really like the idea.) (While we did eventually sail across the Atlantic, it was on a different trip, years down the line….) The November 1st house meeting began to loom in our household as a Very Important Date. We would explore, then we would Decide.

Ok, it blows my mind that this post is missing one of the most important conversations of our entire lives; certainly one of the most critical one of this process. Dear Lord, amateur writers indeed. So, here’s what we totally forgot to write, back in the day: one quiet evening, we are sitting in our beloved, now-gone Queen Anne chairs, looking out on our peaceful backyard. We’re chewing the fat on some aspect or other of our scouting trip, just noodling around. Something about the tone of the conversation starts to tug at my attention, and eventually I get the courage to say to Lisa, give or take, “we are talking about this plan in pretty concrete terms. ‘We will go on scouting trip at X.’ ‘We will make a decision on November 1.’ ‘We will begin the consolidating process before year-end.’ Et cetera… Sweetie, do you think there’s any chance that we’re going to come back from our scouting trip and decide not to move?”

She goes very still. Now that I’ve said it out loud she realizes she’s been thinking it, too. With a slow, nervous smile she looked at me and said “no, not really.” It was like when you find the right key for the door you’re trying to get into and you feel the lock click open. “So, why,” I asked her, “are we bothering with the scouting trip?” And I swear to you it was just that simple. We’d already decided that we were comfortable with the idea that we could put up with anything for a year if we had to, so why not treat that as, at worst, an extended scouting trip?

Ok, so that’s the last revision to the plan, right? We don’t need the scouting trip, so we’ll save a little money there, and we’ll start laying out the details for the mid-2022 move. Awesome!

Except!

Except. As we are noodling around with our plans, we see several houses in our neighborhood go on the market and sell, almost instantly, for significant amounts over their asking prices. Like I said, insanely hot market. The numbers keep going up. And somewhere out of the blue (but certainly out of much thinking in her mind) Lisa says to me “if our house would sell for an additional $50,000 from where we’ve been budgeting, I’d be comfortable with leaving earlier.” See, our budget had included what we already thought was an optimistic estimate of a sale price for our home, but the market seemed to be blowing past this estimate like we were standing still. So, with quite a bit of anxiety, we schedule a meeting with an old neighbor friend of ours who is now a quite successful real estate agent. (Mildly embarassing to realize that we didn’t originally include a link. Sorry, Andrew!) Not that we’re bragging about our real estate agent exactly, we just mean to say that he’s a reliable source of information; he’s sold hundreds of homes over the last few years. We met on Monday, June 21st. After a lovely presentation from Andrew the conclusion is that he recommends us to list at $60,000 over our budgeted number, and notes that on average the homes in our area have been going for ~9% over asking price. Gulp.

Nothing in life is certain except death and taxes, I’m told, and certainly a lot can go wrong in the world between now and then. (Many things went sideways, but not this part of the plan!) But if the world spins on at even roughly the way it is now, we are going to list our home in late October. We will spend Thanksgiving with Lisa’s family in San Francisco, and on the 29th of November we will board a flight that will end in Lisbon, Portugal.

When we decided to move to Portugal, we thought we would just sell everything, get an extra suitcase or duffel bag, and just go. That was the fantasy. The reality was that we had almost two decades of accumulated belongings from two 3+ bedroom houses and a lot of legacy items from previous generations. There was nothing “just go” about what we had to do.

Caveat: while I’m not a professional mover I did move my company four times in 15 years, and I personally have moved about 30 times, including four times from coast to coast in the USA. If you need more “proof” of expertise, I have several good friends in the diplomatic corps and armed forces — people who move on a near-professional level who contributed their thoughts and feelings about how they organized their moves. You, however, get to benefit from what we learned.

Here are my suggestions for making your move easier:

Create a central place to keep everything you are working on. We used the Microsoft ecosystem (specifically, Outlook tasks and calendar, To Do, Excel) as we share a server and household network. Doing so allowed us both to access spreadsheets, documents, and save various types of files in ways we could both see, without duplicating files. Some use Google Drive in the same fashion. I’m told that OneNote has some great features such as a checklist template you can create with one click. No matter what you use, make it able to check off items as they get done. From this list, you can itemize even further, such as “What do I need to put in the carry-on bags?” and “Schedule appointments to get prescriptions.”

Make a list, and try to make it a single list instead of many. Your central list needs to remain central, so add sub items instead of creating entirely new lists. This, in some ways, is the hardest part because you really need to sit down and imagine every single thing that needs to get done. Doing so creates a record of what needs to happen and gets all of those things out of your head. We found that when we had more than one list we started to lose track of what was — and wasn’t — happening.

Plan for a specific time each week to talk about the move. If you don’t you’ll find yourself constantly thinking — and talking — about it. And you will get burnt out so very fast. We made time each Saturday to talk about what we’d learned, researched, or worried about. Some weeks it was just a quick check in, others it was several hours and big changes to our plans. Before we made scheduled time, talking about the move was constant and draining.

Keep track of what is where, and with whom. It’s hard to stay organized if you don’t know where your things are, so track them. List what will go in your suitcases and bags coming with you. For the items you ship (if you do), label each item/ box/ container with a number and list what is in each. Keep a master list, and print smaller lists to put in each case/ box/ bag. If you are shipping, it can be months before your items arrive and I guarantee you will forget what you packed except in broad strokes.

Cancel services and subscriptions. The easiest way to do this is to go through all of your monthly, quarterly, and yearly bills and be sure to cancel anything you won’t still use abroad. We use Quicken to track our finances, so it was super fast to pull up a list of all bills paid in a year. Examples of things to cancel include:

• Health insurance — unless you’ll be using it the new country (which would be unusual, so double check this)
• Car insurance
• Home / renter’s insurance
• Utilities, including electric, gas, water, etc.
• Cell phone plan
• Internet plan
• Gym membership
• Shopping clubs, like Costco
• Magazine / Newspaper subscriptions
• Online streaming subscriptions, like Hulu (some work in other countries, but usually require a new account, or will have a very different cost, so check first!)
• Subscription boxes

Organize your paperwork with an eye towards accessibility. First, get official copies made of birth and marriage certificates, as well as social security cards. Take one set with you, and leave one in a safe place — perhaps with a relative or in a Then, make digital copies by scanning everything. It’s not legal, but if anything gets lost (or stolen) you’ll have a copy to tide you over until a replacement arrives. Organize the documents in a binder — 1″ is probably big enough — each in a clear plastic sleeve. travel with this in your carry-on and keep it handy wherever you travel. Add to the binder as you acquire important documents; you will be so very grateful for this over time.

Documents to bring when you move abroad include:

• Passport
• Visa
• Work Permit
• Birth Certificate
• Medical records
• School records
• Social Security card
• Marriage certificate
• Adoption papers
• Child custody papers
• Divorce papers
• Driving license

Get up-to-date medical and dental records, and new prescriptions. We got our entire medical history, with diagnosis, chart notes, and the whole shebang in .pdf files. Having them made integrating into our new health services very easy. Many pharmacies will fill US prescriptions, at least once, and being able to print a summary of chart notes to give to your new doctor or dentist will make that intake appointment much smoother. Especially for women: include mammogram imaging. We also had to provide documentation of our prior medical history to qualify for local health insurance to get around a three-month waiting period.

Make a list of everything and decide what you’ll keep, sell, store, or take. We already had an excel spreadsheet inventorying everything we owned for insurance, so we used that as our starting point for thinking about, and deciding how to handle, all of our possessions. Be detailed about what you own: open drawers and boxes. Leave no place unexamined, no item listed. This process can take a very long time, as can deciding what to keep and take. Be gentle with yourself, a lot of emotion can be invested in physical things.

When deciding whether to keep something, if you love it, I suggest you find a way to bring it. If that just isn’t possible, can it be held by a friend or family member? Otherwise, consider how useful it will be in your new home. Will you truly use that silver service for entertaining? Those table linens? Electronics are tricky because of the voltage variances, not everything will function well with an adapter or may require a transformer. Can you replace it instead of shipping it? Clothes can also be tricky if your body type is not standard to your new country. Clothes may be more difficult to replace than you might imagine — and online shopping might be a whole lot more expensive. In general, it is usually less expensive to check extra bags rather than shipping boxes, crates, or containers. If you’re only moving small things, you can check cardboard boxes as long as they fit the airline’s dimensions and weight restrictions. Even if you check 3-4 bags, it will probably be the cheapest and least-onerous way to get your belongings to your new home.

For the items you will not take with you, decide whether to keep it in storage or discard. Consider a holding a series of garage sales, or using one of a variety of online auction houses. In some cities, you can utilize a company like Maxsold which will auction off every item in your home for a fee and percentage of sales. Elsewhere you might find a local auction house to do the same. Doing it yourself or paying someone else is up to your level of tolerance and free time. We used MaxSold (clicking on the link will take you to the first of our series of posts about working with them) and highly recommend it for sheer convenience. It may help you decide whether to store things to consider the sheer cost. For us, the least expensive option would have been about $120 each month ($1,440 a year with costs increasing annually).

Consolidate your finances. Pay off debts and close excess bank accounts and credit cards; you want to reduce the number of places you have to pay attention to on an ongoing basis. Setup new bank accounts and figure out how you will move your money or exchange it from one currency to another.

Moving internationally is a Big Deal. It’s hard and not for everyone. Doing some extra organization and planning can make it a lot easier.

We’d love to hear what else you did to make your move easier?

Our story begins with a Zoom call with a real estate agent we’d been recommended through a colleague of theirs. We were living in Seattle, it was summer, and we needed a lease in hand for our appointments to file our applications for the D7 visa that would allow us to stay in Portugal until a residency meeting could take place. Let’s just say now that, whatever the twists and turns of this story are, we like the guy and would recommend him to others if they needed property in his city. ANYWAY, we discuss wants and needs and he sets off to find a place for us. WE scrounge through probably hundreds of listings on a few different websites, occasionally sending a handful to the agent so he could vet them for us and see if they were ok in person. It took us awhile (as in, not until we’d lived here for awhile) to realize that the Portuguese do not see it as a professional obligation to hold your hand in the way that Americans do. Since he often had no news, he would be silent for days or even weeks at a time. That’s just how they do. I can’t imagine Redfin coming to be in Portugal for example; all these “constantly stay in touch” tools probably make no sense here. ANYWAY x2, long story short we only ever actually see recommended apartments from him on two places, and this is in the yellow-orange zone for getting a deal done in time, so we pick the place that looks more interesting and tell ourselves “well, we can live anywhere for a year, so if it sucks we’ll just deal and then move on.”

Well. Our initial impression when we got there was that the online photos did the place a great disservice. It was cute! Charming, kinda funky and unusual, but refurbished with modern fixtures etc. Plus, because we happened to have the 1st floor, rear apartment of this converted row house we actually had a yard! We really thought we had lucked into a winner. But it didn’t take long before we noticed a serious problem. (John’s trying this new thing where he gets to the *#(@&^# point.) Water would drizzle down a wall we shared with the building next door, pooling in a couple spots in the kitchen and the basement/living room. Not giant pools, but genuine puddles. Not only was that no fun, Lisa’s nose quickly informed us that the place was developing a mold problem. Fun!

Communications with our landlords were tricky. While they have Portuguese backgrounds they had lived and worked in other countries for a long time; they currently live in Paris. It took forever and a day to even get them to understand that we were not being typical Americans complaining about the humidity. Fortunately we managed to get in contact when we traveled to Paris (not to see them, but…) and we got to meet face to face, show them photos we’d taken and described the issue. They seemed genuinely engaged and wanting to fix the problem. I mean, it’s *their* property, having a serious mold problem can be a royal female-dog to remedy.

However, for a variety of reasons, none of which in a vacuum would be considered unreasonable, things dragged. They were going to have a painter come out and assess/fix. Then their painter explained to them that he was a bad choice for that kind of work (good call), so they had to scrounge for an actual contractor who did this kind of work and come over to, well, do that kind of work. He absolutely diagnosed the problem (long and not interesting story, but in short: water accumulates on roof next door and slowly drains off, during heavy rains the drainage can’t keep up and overflow happens) and said he’d report back to the landlords. THEN one of the landlords says he needs to see for himself, perhaps to do the work himself, he says. Great. He says he’s coming in *March*. We told them about the problem in mid-*December*. It’s an actual and growing health concern. We hit the limit. We were out.

So, the apartment hunt was on, again. This time we were in town to see places, which was good, but the rental market is starting to get nutty here, which is not so good. A place we absolutely loved got snaked out from under us because we went to our next appointment mostly as a courtesy; we called place 1 after a walk through place 2, but it had been reserved by someone else. Boo. In the end it came down to a place that was right in the center of town, with a funky collection of furniture and unusual layout + a ginormous deck, or else a completely bougie apartment that was perfect in size and layout. Oh, and the funky place was up four flights of stairs. And we’re not spring chickens. Yeah, we’ll take bougie and comfy. In pretty close to record time we saw the place, said we’d take it, got the lease and such in order, and got moved in – all in about two weeks. Today was the move, which consisted of moving approximately three pieces of furniture and a couple van’s-worth of boxes and miscellany. Now the only complication is that we’re in the final approach for our residency visa appointments, so we won’t get to finish settling in for a few days, minimum.

Wait, residency visa appointments? Yuuup. Tune in next week for what will surely be a download of events, for good or for ill.

We left off last time teasing the series of milestones that passed us by on a near-daily basis. A little context: there has been some advice going around in immigrant* circles that suggests you be content if you get one thing accomplished in a day. Between the language barrier, the culture shock, and just trying to live your life, getting one thing done in a day actually does feel like you had a good day. Our first shop in a grocery store took about two hours, and we went out with a granny grocery trolley’s-worth of vittles. Add in getting there and getting back, deciding where things would go in the Tetris-like kitchen we currently inhabit, and then actually eating some of said vittles (just to say we did it, honestly) was absolutely all that was going to happen that day. So what else does an accomplishment look like around here?

On our first day in our actual apartment (as opposed to the AirBnB we stayed out for the first couple days) we met our real estate agent there. He showed us in and we got our first real look at the place.

Both of us were RELIEVED.

The apartment looked so much better in person than the photos had led us to fear. (Funny side story: It turns out we both felt that the place we’d chosen would be adequate, that we would be able to “get by.” Neither said this to the other, not wanting to bring each other down.) For one thing, the photos left us wondering if we had to enter through the backyard, and whether there really were two bathrooms — was one down in the cave? Turns out this is a lovely apartment, recently remodeled, with hardwood floors and high ceilings, just up a flight of stairs from the front door. The cave is behind the retail area (empty) below us. We have neighbors across the hall (in the front of the building, with balconies on the street) and above us, a total of four units. Our backyard, while seriously overgrown, is huge. The furnishings are fine, and we can rearrange everything to make it all work.

Lisa did note that there seemed to be some water damage on the floor and in a couple of walls, and there was a definite “musty” smell to the air, but didn’t see any mold. (This is what’s known as foreshadowing.) We put the funky smell down to the unit being closed up for months and figured it would get aired out soon enough with our being here.

Our only “oh dear” moment was when we realized the place had no cooling/heating units, something we’d completely overlooked in our discussions with our realtor. It was on our list of needs when we were putting it together, but somehow not in what we asked him for. Our mistake, totally, and it pushed “go shopping for home goods” to the very top of our list. The last thing our real estate agent did for us after helping us with utilities and going to lunch was to drop us off at the mall; woo, shopping! We muddled our way through home heating options, and after we’d settled on a couple we paid for them and arranged for delivery. We inquired about the charge and was told it would be 2 euros. Wait, what? 2 bucks (yeah yeah) for home delivery? Oookayy… Sure enough, *the next morning* they arrived via postal delivery. This place is nutty sometimes, I tell you what.

And that’s it. That’s what a day’s accomplishment can look like. Future days have included climbing such mountains as “order lunch to go”, “turn on the television”, and “make a recognizable sandwich.” As our proficiency slowly develops in communicating (faster typing in google translate, or actually learning some words, take your pick) these things become less intimidating and we have hopes of knocking down two or three tasks in a single day. Time will tell, and we shall report the results faithfully.

* the prevalent term is “Expat” but we’ll get into why we don’t like the term (but aren’t prepared to go to war over it) later.

So, about that difficult move-in. One thing we’d expected, because we’ve done our research, was that it was going to be cold in our house for some period of time after we moved in. the reason for this was very practical; our house was going to be empty for at least two months before we moved in. Moreover, the way Portugal handles electricity is very different from how it is in the United Sates. Mainly, Portugal meters out electricity, metaphorically, like pipes of water rather than a big puddle that everyone can take from as they need. I guess people like this because it forces them to keep everything under a very specific amount of power used at any one time, so the central power grid never gets overloaded. Americans usually have trouble with this because we are seen as energy hogs. One example showed a family trying to run multiple computers, with the teen son watching TV, the parents listening to a stereo, the daughter drying her hair, and Mom using a vacuum cleaner. Doing so all at once is pretty much guaranteed to blow a circuit in Portugal, no matter how large your house. In fact, our AirBnB had a card slot right by the front door, like some hotels do, so you could shut off all the power in the place just by removing the card. Very smart if your aim is to conserve power as much as possible.

In any case, one of our first purchases on our first day, before we even moved in, was two oil-filled heaters, much like portable radiators to provide slow steady heat. These got delivered to us the very next morning, which was fantastic because then we could start heating the house. We thought that would be fine even if it seemed to be slow to warm. The very first night was terrible: I was trying to read wearing a t-shirt, a long sleeve shirt, my hoodie, a scarf, and my polar fleece jacket with a blanket wrapped around my legs over my wool socks and shoes. Despite all that I was freezing cold. But we endured, trusting that it would get better . . . and it did. Slower than we could have wanted, but we warmed the central room over the next two days, then we were able to open up the two side rooms which will be our offices. All in all, it took almost a week to get our house up to a comfortable temperature. In our defense, we are pretty happy in temperatures that other people might find downright chilly. During winter, our old house was only heated more than 66* when we had company, and we cheerfully let the house cool down to 60 overnight. We’ve never tried to live in t-shirts and shorts during the winter.

Complicating this heating process was the peculiarities of power consumption in Portugal. That water pipe metaphor at the beginning? The thing about those pipes is that they aren’t one-size-fits-all; you contract with the utility for what the diameter of your pipe is (again metaphorically, just hang in there) as a separate issue from how much comes through the pipe. In other words, if you’ve contracted for a teeny-tiny pipe, it doesn’t matter how much electricity you are willing to pay for, it’s still going to come out in dribs and drabs. What this all meant is that we spent a chaotic day or two trying to play the game of exactly which electricity consumers we could run without tripping the fuses. Did you see the movie Apollo 13? If you did, remember the part where they were working out exactly which systems they could power up, in which order, so as not to ruin the mission completely? For slightly lower stakes, we were living that life. The real wild-card in the game was the electric water tank. When you take a shower it’s going to start up, no doubt. So if we were going to take a shower we’d shut off lights and maybe one of the heaters (I’m not kidding). However, those things also occasionally turn on to cook the water up a bit if it has cooled off. That’s random to anybody that’s not a water sensor in a hot water heater. Which means if we had crept up too close to the line, the water heater could flip on and then everything went dark. It was… an unpleasant couple of days.

In the end, however, it was simply difficult, not catastrophic. As you might expect, because our landlords wanted to keep the bills as low as possible while the place was vacant, they had arranged for the absolutely smallest pipes. It took some wrangling (for… reasons, the utilities remain in the landlords’ names, so they’re an extra link in the telephone game) but eventually everyone understood the problem. Figures, right about the time we got good at playing the Apollo 13 game, the pipes got expanded. Still, it’s nice to be able to keep listening to music and have a light on while the other one of us is in the shower. And while that was all going on, we were knocking out small accomplishments practically every day. Like what?

See you next time.

It’s been quite a three-weeks! Here are some of the lights, high and otherwise. Sorry for the multi-parts, but this would go way too long otherwise. Think of it as our holiday gift to you (heh).

We had almost no trouble at Lisbon* Airport (LIS), other than one brief kerfluffle caused by John carrying the bag with all of the critical documents in his cart of luggage and Lisa pushing a cart full of all our boxes, making it look like she was bringing something *other* than luggage, and then — this is the critical part — us getting separated. John was left standing on the far side of customs and immigration, wondering where his wife was. Fortunately, he was able to pantomime with a friendly guard (albeit not friendly enough to let him back in) and he remembered just enough of his lessons to say “a minha esposa...?” and the guard generally indicated that she was stuck down the hall, but a couple minutes later he waved and smiled and pointed, and out Lisa came a moment later. Oopsie. Our per-arranged shuttle worked out well, although during three hours of idle chit-chat it became increasingly clear that we should veer away from political topics. Apparently we were 10% too friendly, which caused our driver to feel comfortable enough to let his guard down about an hour in, aaaaand… let’s just say that his opinions were quite a bit further to the right than we were comfortable. He was polite, a good driver, and took us to a grocery store for basic provisions, so we have no complaints. Just, you know… sports. Sports are always good small talk.

We spent our first two nights in an AirBnB about 100m (look at me, going metric) from our actual home. This was based on the very prescient advice from our real estate agent that there was no reason to assume that power and water would be working in our new place, and indeed it kind of wasn’t. Nevertheless, we were essentially in our neighborhood. I’m sure we’ll write volumes about it over time, but here’s the skinny: we love it. Our goals when looking for a roost in Portugal were that we wanted not to need a car, to be close to the downtown area that’s largely pedestrian-only and, where it’s not, it’s very pedestrian-friendly. With our agent’s considerable help, we nailed it. We are a 5 minute walk in a straight line from the downtown area; out our door and turn right. Meanwhile, on our street we have butchers (plural), fishmongers (plural), a handful of what I’m calling bodegas for now, barbershops, a hardware store, multiple electrical shops (appliances, odds-n-sods like extension cords and plugs etc…), and pastry shops.

A lot. of. pastry shops. Pastelaria is what you call them, and dear Lord they are everywhere. (This is not a bad thing.) The Portuguese clearly have a sweet tooth in the morning, at least based on the difficulty in finding an un-stuffed, un-glazed croissant. If chocolate-covered eclairs are your thing, however… By the way, they are definitely John’s thing, so he’s happier than um porco in merda. Two quick-ish pastelaria stories: 1) on day one, John went down to Pastelaria Caravela (learn the name, we’ll probably be writing about this place for years to come), ordered up a few things, and went to pay with a credit card; all of this in Portuguese or pantomime, there was no English to be had. The gentleman behind the counter promptly gestured that they didn’t take cards. “No problem,” John gestured and mumbled back, “I’ll be write back with cash.” The man seemed to understand, smiled and nodded, and John turned to leave. “Hey,” the man communicates, “you forgot the pastries.” John explains again (he thinks) that he’s off to get the money, but the man clearly understands that part, just not the part where John doesn’t take the pastries. Ooooooookay. So John rushes to their AirBnB, sets down the pastries, and tells Lisa that he’ll be right back, he needed to get cash to pay because they don’t take cards. Lisa accepts this as a very natural thing to do, of course. John rushes back and goes in to pay. In response to which, the man eloquently gestures, raises eyebrows, and says with tone of voice if not words (John still doesn’t speak Portuguese after all) “why the hell didn’t you eat before coming back?” Story 2) We went to a shopping center to get some basics, and it was lunch time and we were hungry so we plop down in the food court. John does a quick circuit of the options and comes back to report to Lisa. “There are 6 options. 3 of them are pastelaria.” This seems less unusual the longer we are here.

To end part one, a bit about our apartment. The short version is that we are very pleasantly surprised when we saw it. We had rented it based on photos we had seen, and the honest truth was that a) we were running short on time until our visa appointment (when we had to produce proof of securing a residence) and b) had actually seen very few options for a variety of reasons. Turns out both John and Lisa had been harboring thoughts along the lines of “eeeennnhh it looks ok, I’m sure it’ll be acceptable, and we can put up with anything for a year.” So, with pretty low expectations, we were impressed by several things. While it is absolutely a small place, it is laid out in a pretty comfortable fashion. It has been recently renovated so while the building is no great shakes, the apartment itself has modern finishes, updated appliances… the whole 9 meters. We had been worried that we wouldn’t actually be able to get it dark at night because of these otherwise-quite-lovely sliding glass doors that were everywhere along the back of the place. No problem, they all have automatic ceiling-to-floor blackout shutters; it feels like we’re closing the blast doors on Hoth every night, but it certainly makes the place cozy. Combined with its knock-out location, there’s a lot to like about the place.

Granted, getting the place up and running turned out to be both complicated and difficult, but I’ll save that for next time. Can I write a tease or what, y’all?

*Fellow immigrants, Lisa and I know that “Lisboa” would be more appropriate if we’re trying to fit in, but we also assume that most of our family and friends that read this don’t know that, and we don’t want this to be more opaque than it will already be. We’ll get there, promise.

It’s funny; I’m old enough to consider the idea of posting something from over the Atlantic some kind of fancy-pants miracle, but really now – it’s just wifi that they sell (for admittedly exorbitant rates) to anybody who wants it. I ain’t fnacy, I’ve just got nine bucks. But I digress. . . actually, I hadn’t really started saying anything, sooooo. . . I gress?

So. About halfway through our flight, over an ocean. Bags are packed and stowed. I’ve watched a movie (‘The Suicide Squad’, as in the newer one, which as far as I could tell had none of the violence cut based on the number of Gallagher’d heads but had every single swear word modified… bizarre. If you’ve seen the movie, think of Idris Elba and his daughter yelling “Forget You!” back and forth, over and over) and there’s still all the hours ahead. Lisa is at rest, trying to catch up on all the sleep that has been stolen from her by worry and crisis. Gods bless her, none of this happens without her. Truth be told, more than half the reason I even wanted to do this crazy thing is so she can set down so many other burdens, but just like Andy Dufresne she had one last (hopefully) sewer of… well, anyway. Hopefully this is the start of a long, long stretch of her being more at ease.

Nothing left to do up here but think, it seems. This wouldn’t really be worth posting to a blog if there wasn’t something to say to all you fine people. So with time to reflect, let’s nibble at the question we got asked the most, in numerous variants: why? Gods only know, we asked it more than any of you ever did.

Part of the answer has to be the traveling. Couples find their interests, some fast, some slower. Our dear friends Dan and Suz (despite being dear friends, honest!, I’ve never been 100% sure how to spell the shortened version of her name. Sorry, Shuzzue) have revealed themselves to be avid fans of F1 racing and going to live music. When I met Dan on his smoke breaks 20 years ago, I wouldn’t have guessed those as his future passions if you’d given me an hour and a dictionary. Point being, I don’t think either of us, had we been using dating profiles back then, would have listed “devote serious amounts of my life to traveling the world” in an “interests” section. And yet, together, we discovered we absolutely adore exploring the arts and culture of the past. Art, yes, but also (maybe more) the archaeological sites we’ve visited. We just can’t get enough of these things, or at least we haven’t yet. Time to up the dosage and see what happens.

There’s more to it, though. Any time we’ve been in Europe, we find ourselves drawn to the cultures we’ve experienced. As time went on we planned our trips around longer stays in fewer places, so we could feel at least a teeny bit like a resident. We spent a long-ish stretch in Venice several years back, and more than the Caravaggios we remember the piazzas, the families and friends gathering together in public squares with children running around, no agenda and no schedule. I certainly remember sitting (and driving, ahem) on the Campo in Sienna with far more accuracy than I do the things we saw in their esteemed cathedral. You can tell me that these same things happen in the U.S. Maybe we’re just unlucky, but we’ve traveled the U.S. a fair bit as well and we don’t have those same experiences to look back upon. By and large, European countries just value different things, and we always have found ourselves incredibly comfortable when we’ve had a chance to immerse ourselves.

Before anyone gets the wrong idea, almost none of our motivation is based on anti-U.S. sentiment. While not exactly chest-thumping patriots, neither are we socialist zealots that are taking the first opportunity to get the hell out of Dodge. There’s an interesting shift in our perspective about America once it was no longer a foregone conclusion that we’d live their for our entire lives, but that’s a different blog post.

I can just smell the eye-rolling out there in internet land. Most of you readers know me well, (we haven’t been advertising or anything so our reach is pretty modest) so you know I’m hardly slow to see the more jaundiced view of things. I know how all of this sounds. Neither of us has any delusion that this is guaranteed to work out. It absolutely could be a boondoggle of historic proportions. We may end up being the object lesson that you scare your children with when they concoct some harebrained scheme. (“You want to start a dog bakery?? You remember what happened to Uncle John and Aunt Lisa, right? Do you really want to live in a box under the overpass? In KENTUCKY??”) But luck, as they say, is the meeting of opportunity and preparation. We’ve been preparing ourselves for this sort of adventure for many years now, and economic conditions are such that the opportunity has presented itself. We’re going to go see if we can get lucky.

[Editor’s note: we’ve been a little busy the last couple of weeks; apologies for going quiet. We’ll be returning to some “how it came together” posts a little later, but the present is where things are really cooking at the moment so we’re going to set history aside for just a bit.]

Greetings from San Francisco! We’ve just finished a week-ish stay here to spend holiday time with portions of Lisa’s family. It was lovely, time well-spent, but today is *the* day. What about the house? Sold. Our stuff? Gone. Car? Somebody else’s. We’ll tell those stories at some point, but today is the new hotness. Heck, we’re even going to skip the story about how all our luggage was almost rendered invalid, the new luggage we did purchase from our hotel, and some last-minute airline prestidigitation. As the White Rabbit said, “No, no, no! No time! No time! No time!”

We arrived at SFO’s International Terminal at about 8:00AM for a flight that leaves at 1:30PM. Early, right? Well, we had two concerns. First, we needed to get COVID tested and, second, we needed to deal with our small mountain of luggage while waiting for our tests. You see, United doesn’t have any provision for HALF-checking in, and since we couldn’t check in without negative results on our COVID tests we couldn’t hand them the bags. Small bit of history: when we arrived in San Francisco last Tuesday we had inquired about the existence of “Skycaps” and had received polite chuckles from the folks at baggage assistance. An older employee even had to explain what I meant to a younger one. Fine. So when we arrived here this morning we were prepared to snag several luggage carts and figure out how to manhandle them to “ATA”, a service that will hold your luggage for you. Lo and behold, however, there is a large sign on the side of the airport with a friendly glyph of a person doffing a cap while standing next to a luggage cart, along with a phone number and the message “Luggage Porter, 8AM-10PM:”. Well then. We called for a porter. Our plan had been to leave our bags at ATA, then go to Terminal 3 (domestic) for our COVID tests at Xpresschex, where we’d made an appt for 8:45*. Our Porter, Javier, had different and far better ideas. Storing our bags was going to be $25 per bag, per hour, and he thought that was obscene. Instead, why don’t we just hang on to the luggage cart, and when our tests are done we just give him a call to finish the job? That seemed great, but still a long way to haul luggage, across multiple terminals and all. “Oh no, not at all” he says; turns out there is a testing facility at Aisle 6 – in this very International Terminal!

The Rapid Testing site opened at 8:15 (just a few minutes after we arrived) and there were about 20 groups ahead of us in the ‘no appt.’ line. John followed Javier to where he was parking the luggage, at the front of the queue, while Lisa held our place in line. Betty, one of the counter workers at the testing place, chatted Javier up for a minute, both of them chuckling about something or other, then she saw the pile and asked if we were flying 1k. John explained that we were not, but mentioned that we were flying Polaris (international business) and she said that was good enough, and started to process us right then and there. (Sorry folks, we didn’t mean to skip the line, it turns out Javier has worked at the airport since before the terminal we were in had been built (that’s 21 years, minimum) and he knows *everybody*. We turned over our passports, paid the $275 pp, and were swabbed by 8:20.

The porter fee is $30 and, needless to say, we highly recommend it. Hauling the bags is almost besides the point, it turns out a local guide knows all the ins and outs. We tipped well (of course) because Javier had saved us hours and hassle, as well as money.

On a different note, the International terminal is just beautiful. The industrial vaulted ceilings have bits of blue that refracts the light like prisms, and the feeling is of being in a flying, or sailing, vessel. Javier told us that the terminal is supposed to be earthquake resistant and pointed out how the columns have bits and bobs in them that will flex and shift if needed. Not sure about all that glass, though…

We checked our bags with no hassle. As I said earlier there will be a post that talks about this in more detail, but suffice it to say we’d been made very nervous about the size and weight of our luggage, and while we “thought” we had solved the problems it was still a relief to see our bags accepted with nary a glance. A painless scoot through TSA and we were in to the land of Duty Free! John bought 3 purses at Hermès and Lisa bought a delicious perfume by Dior with Julia Stiles’ face on it… ok, no, but those places do crack us up. In actuality, it was a short hustle to the United Lounge, where we are now ensconced for the wait before boarding. We’ll catch you up on some of the other details later today, knock wood.