u/FatherBrownstone

Moving from the UK to the USA (Central England to SW Virginia). International moving companies all seem to (1) offer a full, door to door service, and (2) charge a lot for it.

My household goods are currently in a storage unit. All small items are boxed and stacked, with furniture tidily arranged, and the whole cubic space filled wall-to-wall and floor-to-ceiling. With the help of a couple of local movers I can hire, it would be easy to pack all this into a 40-foot container, filling it to about a height of 4-5 feet. (According to my calculations, it would just fit in a 20-foot, but that would require packing it to the absolute top, and I'm concerned we might end up finding it doesn't all fit.) I can then be at my home in Virginia when the container arrives, and again hire a few guys to help unload the goods into my house. Loading can be done in one day, and unloading in one day.

Question 1: is this feasible? Will freight forwarders and customs agents accept self-packed goods?

Question 2: will this actually allow me to save a lot of money, compared to just hiring an international moving company for their standard service?

I think I messed up. Asking whether there is any avenue for getting any help with this situation.

I bought a house in Blackstone, VA. The previous owners had let things go a bit, but had been living there. I got insurance immediately, paid for the whole year, and have been doing a bunch of fixing things up since I moved in.

I hired a local contractor to do some painting and some work in the kitchen, but we parted ways a couple of weeks ago because he was behind on every schedule he'd given me, and the painting he had done was very poor - loads of paint splashed where it shouldn't go. As we were parting ways, not on very agreeable terms, I saw him pulling away from my house in his pickup truck as I was getting back. Never saw him again. Was glad to be done with him.

Now, we've just had the first rain since, and I find my roof has been vandalized. Leaks everywhere, made deliberately with tools, need a new roof worth $13k. The damage is not visible from the ground.

And going through the mail, I found a letter from my insurer that I didn't look at from 3 weeks ago, cancelling the insurance effective 15 days after because of trees and bushes too near to the house. I just didn't look at the letter before. The trees and bushes are long gone, I had cleared them before the date on the letter.

Is there anything I can do? Should they have given me more notice, or notified me any other way? Do I have any kind of case, in that I'm sure the damage was done before the cancellation date stated in the letter, even though I only found out about it when it next rained? Or am I just screwed? I thought I was insured and can't afford a new roof.

So, the time has come to transfer the data from my Fitbit account to a Google account. But my Google account is close to the 15GB limit for free storage - I go in and delete a few old files every time it goes past 98%. I've seen conflicting reports about whether Fitbit data counts against the storage quota, and how much data we're talking if it does. Any clear answers?