The Epic PCS: Our Stuff

Looks great! Now take it apart!

When we first heard "The News" Matt and I were sitting in the apartment in Virginia that I had almost perfected. There were curtains in the windows, matching pillows and lamps in the living room, and all my pictures hung on the walls. It was time to take everything down, pack everything away, and get rid of as much as possible.

When you PCS the military gives you a weight limit for your possessions based on your rank and whether or not you have dependents. When you move overseas the military will only move 25% of the original weight limit. Therefore, Matt and I had to ensure that we only kept 3,000 pounds worth of stuff to take with us to Okinawa. In order to compensate for the weight restrictions on bases overseas, the military will loan you furniture for the number of people in your household, so we will have furniture to sit on in our new home.

I was so excited to have professional movers lift all of the heavy pieces that Matt and I struggled with moving into our apartment. In order to schedule your move you work with TMO, the traffic management office. They told Matt and me that everything had to be done through their website. That website does not work well on a Mac, which is of course what we have. I waited a few weeks until I was home for my sister's graduation, and I used my parent's computer to schedule a move right before our lease ended on our apartment. When I was back in Virginia I went to TMO in order to discuss my move. They told me I had to wait until I was assigned a counselor before they could schedule anything. Out of curiosity one of the women in the office asked when I wanted to move. I told her two weeks. Her words to me were, "That is not going to happen." And it did not.

When I was finally assigned a counselor the earliest date she would schedule a move for me was mid-June. I explained that Matt would already have started his training in another state, and the lease on our current apartment ended the last day in May. She shrugged. There was nothing we could do except pay for a storage unit that would hold our stuff until TMO could schedule a move.

Matt and I set to work packing and purging. We made three runs with a full trunk to the local Goodwill. We donated all of the unopened food items in our pantry to a local food bank. The couch I had bought used at a thrift store for our first apartment in Georgia we sold to one of Matt's fellow students. He had rented a house with three other Marines, and they had no furniture to speak of yet. He picked up the couch in his truck, and we threw in our bookshelves, our desk, and our desk chair for free. He assured us that many marines would sleep on that couch in the future to escape the barracks. It would be appreciated.

We managed to move the rest of our possessions to the storage unit without renting a truck solely by asking favors of our friends. We borrowed one of Matt's friend's truck (and muscles) for our bedroom set and coffee table, and another of Matt's friends let us use his moving truck before he filled it up for our futon and dining room table. All of the boxes fit in our cars that we drove back and forth between our apartment and storage unit.

All of our belongings except for our summer clothing are now safely stored in a climate controlled unit, but this is by no means the end of the story. Stay tuned to see how (and if) our stuff makes it all the way to Japan!