The Housing Question

Next to "when are you leaving?" the most commonly asked question these days for our family seems to be "where will you live in Italy?"

The only answer we can give at this time is...we don't know!  We will be in temporary lodging facilities (TLF, or whatever the Navy equivalent is for that) for awhile, similar to what we're in now, only smaller. :-/  (Two bedrooms instead of three.)  Lord willing, we will find something to rent on the economy very soon after our arrival.  We are expecting to have to rent elsewhere, as there are limited government housing units, all of which are too small for our family of 8.  However, it is not unheard of for them to knock out a door between two adjacent units for larger families, IF they have excess units available.  If this is an option, we would certainly take it!

Otherwise, we expect to begin the search for a suitable house to rent as soon as we can upon our arrival.  Our preference would be something in a more rural community as opposed to in the city of Naples itself.

All of our appliances will be from the long-term loan warehouse, so we don't have to worry about that.  In fact, we sold our refrigerator, washer, and both of our dryers rather than put them in storage.  If we live in government housing, it is already wired for both kinds of power; if we are in an Italian house, we can get two free converters from the base (though we'd want to buy more).  There are smaller items we can borrow while we wait for our own shipments to arrive, so if we move away from TLF before our express shipment comes in, we'll be all right.  The household goods are supposed to arrive 60-90 days from the time they leave our house...or maybe the time they leave the States, I'm not sure.

In some ways, I feel as if we are flying by the seat of our pants!  We haven't gotten a WHOLE lot of information/advice about overseas moves...I feel as if I should have picked people's brains a little more on this, but the last few months have been such a blur!  This is the first time I haven't felt all that satisfied with the way I left the house for the packers--I feel VERY disorganized.  For one thing, items that I had set aside, intending to take with us to have on the journey (some crayons, activity books, and read alouds, for example), apparently got packed with our household goods.  Other items that I intended to throw out or donate have also been packed.  We'll have a lot more organizing to do on the other side than we might have if we had been able to get through our checklist the way I had intended to, but at this point...what can we do about it?  Might as well sit back and enjoy the ride!