LF: Bagged & Tagged

That's right! 12 days before the bags are scheduled to be collected by UPS on behalf of Luggage Forward, all four duffels that we will be shipping to Insignia are packed and ready to go.

Each bag — stuffed to the gills — is below the 50-pound weight limit ... several of them are closer to the 40-pound mark on the scale. All of the odds and ends. All of the hard-to-pack-in-a-suitcase items. They all made it into these bags. That was our goal. Clothing and items prohibited by Luggage Forward — medications, electronics, and valuables ... to name a few — will go with us on the flight to Miami.

Just because we got the master bedroom cleared today doesn't mean we get to move back in there. No ... now the second phase of our prep work begins! Thank goodness for a spare bedroom … otherwise, we’d be sleeping on a mattress on the floor 😉

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If you are interested in the process we followed to pack our to-be-shipped bags, I've included a summary below. Otherwise, you've got the gist of this footprint already and can skip the rest.

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(1) I created a checklist of the things we planned to ship as we placed them in numbered boxes on the bed. (Every little thing was noted on the checklist.) We’ve been pulling things out for shipment since early November, so the numbers on the boxes helped us to find things if we changed our minds or wanted to replace something.

(2) We placed the duffels on the bed, numbered them to correspond with the LF tag numbers, and lined them with oversized trash bags to protect the contents from possible water (rain) damage. The dryer sheets we put in each bag should protect the contents from smelling musty.

(3) I pulled up the inventory on my laptop, and as Mui placed an item in one of the four duffels, I marked the corresponding bag number on the checklist. BONUS: By the time we were done, I had a by-bag inventory to reference should a bag go astray on the way to Miami.

(4) After the luggage tags were zip-tied to the bags, I took photos of each bag with the label legible ... a precaution against any mishap along the way.

Our process may have been more organized — some might say anal — than strictly necessary. But the extra work was worth it to make the shipment-packing easy peasy. In fact, we'll follow a similar process with our checked bags as well.Читать далее