Once we had pulled the trigger on the move, the first thing we did was to speak to a real estate agent and get the house ready to be put on the market. The other activity was to hire a shipper. After speaking to couple of the shippers and hearing the first hand experiences of our friends we decided on Sky2C (sky2c.com) for our shipping needs. The house took exactly a month to get sold (little longer than I expected). We had in the meantime arranged for rental as a backup. Some of the personal items sold pretty quickly and especially the vehicles took longer. Finally I had to sell them below fair market price for lack of time. I found CraigsList.com to be very effective for selling personal household items and of course eBay if you have the patience to deal with shipping.
Sky2C did a great job in packing and shipping. Our household stuff fit into a 20ft container end to end. We decided to bring with us all our furniture, although after coming over to India I realized that some stores in Bangalore (FamilyMart) sell very contemporary furniture for much less than what it costs in US.
I found that the hardest task of this move was getting rid of things. After the container left on May 1, Bhavani and kids left for New Jersey on their way to India. There was so much of stuff left around the house including in all the garage cabinets, I constantly spent 2-3 hrs a day disposing it off to either charities or just dumping it. Dumping is not easy when you don't live in an apartment. So, what do you do? Put the stuff in the van, go to an apartment complex and dump it ;-)
I will write about the experiences at customs in India on a separte post
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