I left New Zealand at the end of 2017 and moved first to Ireland. At the time, leaving most of my belongings behind did not seem particularly dramatic or permanent. International relocations are complicated enough without trying to move an entire household at the same time, and my reasoning was straightforward: I would first establish myself in Europe, understand where I was going to live permanently, find a suitable home, and then organise the shipment of everything that remained in New Zealand. I had no reason to believe that this would become anything more than a temporary logistical arrangement.
That assumption turned out to be spectacularly wrong.
Ireland did not become my permanent destination. In May 2019 I moved again, this time to Germany, and started the process of establishing a new life in Berlin. Even then, I could not simply order a container and bring everything immediately. I had only just arrived in the country, I was dealing with all the usual administrative requirements of moving to Germany, and I still had no suitable long-term accommodation. It was only around September 2019 that I finally found a place where I could realistically imagine receiving and storing the belongings that had remained in New Zealand.
By then, almost two years had already passed since I had left. Nevertheless, I was still thinking of the situation as temporary. My possessions were safe in storage, I was paying for the storage, and nothing had disappeared. Once I was properly settled in Berlin, I would organise the move.
Then, less than twelve months after I had finally established myself properly in Germany, COVID-19 arrived and everything changed. In early 2020 the world effectively stopped. Germany entered lockdown, international flights were cancelled or heavily reduced, borders closed, government offices reduced their operations and New Zealand introduced exceptionally strict entry controls. What had previously been a complicated international move became, for a period of time, practically impossible. Travelling to New Zealand simply to inspect and organise storage was no longer something one could casually do, and there was no certainty about when normal international movement would resume.
The possessions stayed where they were. At that stage I still believed that this was merely another delay.
When I still thought I would move everything
Looking back through my old emails now is interesting because they preserve the way I was thinking before I understood how difficult this would become. In January 2020, before the full consequences of the pandemic had become clear, I contacted the company managing my storage units in Levin to obtain their dimensions. I had two units: one approximately seven metres by three metres and another around three metres by three metres, with a height of roughly two and a half metres. Depending on how the space was calculated, I was dealing with something in the region of 75 to 80 cubic metres of stored belongings.
That was an important reality check. This was not a case of sending a few boxes through the post. I had accumulated a considerable amount of property during my years in New Zealand, including books, household items, personal equipment and, most significantly, a large collection of old computers and related technology. Computing has been part of my professional and personal life for decades, and over the years I had accumulated machines, components, software, documentation and other equipment representing different generations of computing. Some of it was ordinary old equipment; some of it had historical or collector interest; some of it mattered to me simply because of what it represented in my own life.
The original plan was conventional enough. I imagined that I would arrange a partial shipping container, have the storage units emptied into it, ship the container to Germany and eventually unpack everything in Berlin. Even that turned out to be more complicated than I expected. The manager of the storage facility explained that a shipping container could not simply be left in front of the units because it would obstruct the access lanes. A professional carrier would probably need to remove the contents and pack them somewhere else.
In May 2020 I contacted a New Zealand international-removal company. They were prepared to help, but naturally they first needed to know what they would be shipping. They could send someone to inspect the unit or I could complete a detailed self-survey inventory. Either way, someone had to open the storage, inspect the contents and coordinate access. I was in Germany. Everything was in Levin. Even at that early stage, the project depended on people physically present in New Zealand.
Still, none of that seemed impossible. It was complicated, certainly, but complications can normally be solved with enough planning. The pandemic was the bigger problem. I could not simply jump on a plane, spend a week or two sorting through everything and supervise the process myself, so once again I waited.
The German Customs surprise
Eventually, once the German government agencies were functioning more normally again, I decided to contact German Customs to understand exactly what would be required to bring my own belongings into Germany. In January 2021 I explained that I had moved from New Zealand to Germany and now wanted to bring my personal property. I specifically mentioned books, old computer hardware and software, and my personal computers. I was expecting guidance about forms, declarations and the normal process for importing household effects after an international relocation.
Instead, I discovered something that I had not known when I arrived in Germany: the customs relief for personal property transferred as part of a relocation was subject to a time limit. German Customs explained that, among the applicable conditions, the belongings generally had to be imported within twelve months after the relocation.
I had moved to Germany in May 2019. By the time I was discussing the matter with Customs in early 2021, that period had already expired.
My reaction was probably predictable. I explained that 2020 had not exactly been a normal year. Germany had been in lockdown. Flights had been cancelled. New Zealand had closed its border to most international travellers and imposed severe entry restrictions. Even travelling there for the purpose of sorting and shipping my property had become extremely difficult. I asked whether temporary exceptions existed because of the pandemic.
The central Customs information service informed me that the competent local customs office could extend the deadline in exceptional cases. That sounded reasonable, so I formally asked the Berlin customs office for an extension until the end of 2022. I explained the chronology: I had moved to Germany in May 2019, only found suitable long-term accommodation around September 2019, intended to organise the shipment in 2020 and then had those plans disrupted by the pandemic and New Zealand's border restrictions.
The answer was disappointing. The local customs office said that I had not arranged and registered the household goods within the required period, that transport had become possible again from the summer of 2020, and that they could not grant the extension I had requested through the end of 2022. I was told that I could return when the goods were actually ready for shipment and provide documents supporting the reasons why the deadline had been exceeded. Otherwise, I could import them through the normal customs process, in which case import VAT could apply.
I understand that laws have deadlines and that public officials are expected to apply them. From the perspective of the person dealing with the practical consequences, however, the result felt absurd. These were not newly purchased products being imported from outside the European Union. They were my own belongings, many of which I had owned for years. I had been prevented from making the move in the normal way by a global pandemic and severe border restrictions, and yet the administrative clock had continued to run.
That was the moment when the financial and logistical calculation became much more uncomfortable. It was possible that I could still obtain exceptional treatment, but only after making concrete shipping arrangements and assembling enough evidence to support the case. To do that properly I needed an inventory. To create the inventory, somebody had to physically inspect the contents in New Zealand. I would need to estimate values, arrange local transport, arrange international freight, complete customs documentation and then hope that the final treatment would be reasonable.
The theoretical sequence was increasingly difficult to justify. I could fly from Germany to New Zealand, inspect perhaps 75 or 80 cubic metres of possessions, document everything, estimate values, arrange a moving company, arrange a container, ship everything halfway around the planet and then deal with German Customs when it arrived. I would be spending a substantial amount of money before knowing exactly what the final cost and administrative outcome would be.
At that point I made what seemed like the only rational decision available: leave everything in New Zealand and decide later.
That word, later, would follow me for years.
Storage became a way of postponing the decision
Storage is psychologically convenient because it allows you to avoid making a permanent decision. As long as the belongings remain safely stored, nothing has really been lost. The furniture is still yours. The books are still yours. The computers are still yours. The photographs, documents, software, cables and boxes still exist. You continue paying the bill and tell yourself that you will solve the problem when circumstances are better.
The problem is that storage is not actually a solution. It is a deferred decision with a monthly fee attached.
As the years passed, the connection between those stored objects and my current life became weaker. Technology aged. Batteries aged. Electronics deteriorated. The value of particular machines changed. Some things that had seemed important when I left New Zealand mattered much less several years later. At the same time, the effort required to deal with the collection did not decrease. If anything, it became worse because I was now even further removed from the context in which I had packed everything.
By 2024, I had accepted that moving the entire collection to Europe was probably no longer sensible. Instead, I began trying to find a responsible way to sell or redistribute at least part of it. This was especially difficult with the computer collection because, to me, it was not simply electronic rubbish. I had deliberately collected old technology over many years. Some machines represented particular stages in the development of personal computing. Some were uncommon. Some were connected with technologies, companies or architectures that no longer existed. Other people may have seen old computers and obsolete equipment; I saw part of the history of the industry in which I had spent much of my working life.
But sentimental value and market value are not the same thing. That was a lesson I would learn repeatedly.
I tried to manage the sale remotely from Europe. I created online photo collections so that people could see what was available. I established a form through which prospective buyers could submit bids. I created a public spreadsheet showing bids without exposing personal information because I wanted the process to be transparent and fair. I contacted people in the New Zealand vintage-computing community, collectors, auction organisations, recyclers and others who might have an interest in the equipment.
One person who saw the photographs described the collection as looking like at least a tractor-trailer load of equipment. That was probably a useful description of the scale of the problem I had created for myself.
In August 2024 I told one contact in the vintage-computing community that I intended to spend about forty weeks trying to sell all or part of the collection. After that, whatever remained would have to be destroyed or disposed of. I did not particularly enjoy writing that, but indefinite storage had become irrational.
I also contacted electronics recyclers. One recycler examined the material and eventually offered NZD 3,000 based primarily on recoverable material value, such as metals and circuit boards, with freight and loading included. I do not have a record confirming that this particular offer was ultimately accepted, so I will not claim that it was. However, the offer itself stayed with me because it demonstrated how radically different two ideas of value can be. To me, the collection represented decades of technology, memories and personal interest. To a recycler, it was a quantity of recoverable materials that could be weighed and priced by kilogram.
Neither view was necessarily wrong. They were simply measuring different things.
Then there was P
Throughout this process there was one unavoidable problem: I could organise almost everything from Europe except the parts that required someone to actually be in New Zealand. I could send emails, negotiate, create spreadsheets, arrange bids, communicate with recycling companies, contact the storage manager and organise documentation. What I could not do from Berlin was unlock a storage unit, meet somebody who wanted to inspect an old computer, move a box, open a door, hand over equipment or drive to Levin.
That is where my friend P entered this story in a much bigger way than I ever intended.
P was not a removal contractor. He was not an auctioneer. He was not my employee. He was not being paid as a logistics manager. He was my friend, living in the Wellington area, and he agreed to help me with what initially seemed like a manageable problem.
In May 2024 I contacted the storage company and explained that a friend was willing to help empty one of the storage units. There was immediately a practical complication: I no longer had the key to the padlock. The manager arranged the gate-access instructions and offered to cut the lock. I copied P into the conversation and told the storage manager that he and P could coordinate directly.
At the time, that seemed like a sensible arrangement. In reality, it was the beginning of a much larger commitment for P. Whenever someone needed physical access, he became the person who could provide it. When a recycling company wanted to inspect the equipment, P became the local contact. When there were questions about what was actually present in the storage, he was the person standing there who could see it. When items had to be moved, collected or handed over, the practical burden increasingly fell on him.
From Europe, I could write something such as “arrange access to storage” and treat it as one task among many. For P, the same task meant driving somewhere, organising a time, waiting for somebody, opening the unit, dealing with a stranger, perhaps moving things, and then driving home. The difference between those two perspectives is enormous, and I am much more conscious of it now than I was while the project was unfolding.
By April 2025, the smaller storage unit had finally been emptied and returned to the storage company. My regular storage cost decreased because only the larger unit remained. That was already a major milestone. Then, on 1 June 2025, P sent an email to the storage manager and me saying that the big unit was finally empty as well. He had closed the door and removed the lock. After years of paying for storage in New Zealand, both units were finally finished.
The word he used was finally, and I think that word says more about the whole situation than I appreciated at the time.
The practical problem had become dramatically smaller, but I also had to recognise the human cost of getting there. P became frustrated during this process. At times, understandably, he became angry. His wife was also unhappy about the amount of time and effort that this problem was consuming. I think it is important to say this openly because otherwise any expression of gratitude would be incomplete and dishonest.
These were my belongings. It was my move that had never been completed. It was my storage problem, my computer collection, my delayed decisions and my responsibility. P and his family had not created any of it. Yet because I was on the opposite side of the world, a substantial part of the physical burden gradually landed on him.
Something that took me ten minutes to organise by email might cost him part of an afternoon. A prospective buyer changing plans was merely another message on my screen, but for him it could mean wasted time. A recycling company wanting access was not simply an appointment in a calendar; it was another journey, another interruption, another piece of somebody else's problem entering his day.
I understand their frustration completely.
In fact, if there is one thing I would handle differently now, it would be to recognise much earlier that a friendship should never become an invisible logistics service. Repeated help can become dangerously easy to normalise. The first favour feels enormous. After the fifth or tenth favour, the person receiving the help can unconsciously begin to treat it as part of the process. That is not fair.
There eventually came a point where the principle became very clear to me: no computer, no box, no piece of furniture and no old possession was worth damaging a friendship. If something had to be lost in order to reduce the burden on P and his family, then it had to be lost.
I am extraordinarily grateful to him precisely because his help was not effortless. He gave his time when he was under no obligation to do so. He coordinated with people he did not know. He dealt physically with possessions that had meaning to me but were, understandably, simply somebody else's old stuff to him. He continued helping through a project that lasted much longer and became far more complicated than either of us expected.
There is no sensible way to calculate the value of that.
The final problem: one hundred kilograms of history
By 2026, the enormous storage problem had been reduced to something much smaller but emotionally much more difficult: documents and photographs. There were around four large boxes of personal documents, roughly 100 kilograms in total, in the Wellington and Porirua area. On paper, that sounds far easier than dealing with tens of cubic metres of household belongings and old computers. In practice, it created another difficult decision because documents are not all equal.
Some papers are replaceable. Others are not. Some are administrative rubbish that no longer matters. Others may be the only surviving original of something important. A document that looks meaningless to someone else may be connected with a previous country, employer or period of life. An old family photograph may have virtually no financial value while being completely irreplaceable.
Among the material were old family photographs and documents that had followed different stages of my life, including original documents connected with my working years in Brazil. Those were not things I wanted casually destroyed.
At first, I still considered moving all of the remaining documents to Europe. The problem was the cost. Figures in the region of several thousand euros, around €3,000 in some of the discussions, were being considered for shipping what was effectively about 100 kilograms of paper. Emotionally, the contents mattered. Financially, the logic was becoming difficult to defend.
By then I was also establishing a new life in Moldova. Spending thousands of euros simply because I had been unable to decide what to do with four boxes in New Zealand began to look like another example of allowing the past to consume resources that belonged to the present.
Eventually, after almost nine years, the decision became painful but clear: I could not save everything. I had to preserve what was genuinely irreplaceable and let the rest go.
That sounds obvious now. It was not obvious when I was emotionally attached to the material.
The next problem was how to destroy the documents that did not need to be preserved. I certainly did not want personal records simply thrown into an ordinary rubbish bin. So in July 2026 I started contacting secure document-destruction companies in New Zealand. I explained that I had left the country years earlier and had approximately four large boxes, around 100 kilograms, of personal documents that needed to be dealt with.
One company replied that it did not operate in the relevant area and could not offer an alternative. Another secure-destruction provider could help, but its ordinary collection service was intended for much larger quantities. A smaller one-off service involved a 240-litre secure bin. The driver could collect the bin, but somebody had to be physically present to fill it. Alternatively, someone could take the documents to the company's depot in Wellington during its opening hours.
Once again, after all the emails, websites, remote arrangements and service providers, the entire process arrived at the same unavoidable point: somebody in New Zealand had to physically pick up the boxes and make decisions.
At one stage I seriously considered flying back myself simply to finish the job. The idea was absurd but logical. I could spend a large amount of money on flights, lose several days travelling almost to the opposite side of the planet, and then stand beside the boxes sorting through old documents because no third party could know which pieces of paper mattered to me.
A cleaning company can remove rubbish. A freight company can move boxes. A secure-destruction company can shred documents. What none of them can do is understand personal significance. A stranger cannot know whether a faded photograph is the only surviving image of a relative. A contractor cannot know whether an old employment document from Brazil is replaceable or whether it represents a period of my life for which almost no other records remain.
The physical labour could be outsourced. The judgement could not.
That realisation finally forced the project into its last stage. The material that really mattered had to be identified and separated. The rest could be destroyed. What survived would be shipped.
And once again, P was the person on the other side of the world helping to make that possible.
The package that finally ended the story
In August 2026, I received a DHL notification. A package was on its way from New Zealand to my address in Chișinău, Moldova.
The sender was P.
After years of seeing his name attached to emails about storage access, recycling, removal and coordination, there was something deeply satisfying about seeing it now attached to the final shipment. The package was expected around 20 August, subject to customs clearance. Naturally, because apparently this entire story was not allowed to end without one final complication, DHL then reported a delivery exception because the address appeared to be incorrect.
At that point, after everything that had happened since 2017, an address problem almost felt appropriate.
Fortunately, it was resolved, and in late August 2026 the package finally arrived.
It contained documents, old family photographs and pieces of my personal history that had survived the long process of deciding what could be kept and what had to disappear. Among them were original records from earlier periods of my life. The physical size of the package bore almost no relationship to the size of the story behind it.
For years, I had imagined that completing my move from New Zealand would involve a shipping container arriving somewhere in Europe. I imagined opening it and seeing the contents of my old life transferred intact into the new one.
Instead, almost nine years later, the move ended with a relatively small DHL package arriving in Moldova.
Most of the belongings never came. The furniture did not come. The bulk of the computers did not come. Many things that I had once considered worth keeping eventually disappeared through sale, recycling, disposal or simple acceptance that they no longer belonged in my life.
But the part that mattered most arrived. The documents arrived. The photographs arrived. The family history arrived.
And I think that, in the end, that was enough.
What I learned from taking almost nine years to finish a move
The first lesson is that temporary storage can become a very expensive way of avoiding a decision. Storage is useful and sometimes necessary, but it should have an expiry date. Every month of storage gives you the comforting illusion that nothing has been lost, while quietly extending the life of a problem that will eventually have to be solved. If I were advising someone making an international move today, I would tell them to decide much earlier what genuinely deserves to follow them and what does not.
The second lesson concerns bureaucracy. Administrative systems operate according to dates, conditions and legal definitions. Human life does not. From my perspective, the pandemic made the normal relocation process practically impossible. From the perspective of Customs, there was still legislation governing the deadline and evidence required for an exception. Both realities existed at the same time. The mistake is assuming that obvious practical circumstances will automatically produce the administrative outcome one expects. They may not.
The third lesson is one I find particularly amusing as someone from IT. I tried to solve this as a distributed project. I used online forms, shared photo repositories, public spreadsheets, email coordination, third-party service providers and remote planning. All of that helped enormously. Yet every workflow eventually reached a point where somebody had to touch something. Someone had to open the storage unit. Someone had to pick up a computer. Someone had to move a box. Someone had to meet the recycler.
You cannot remotely administer the physical world indefinitely.
The fourth lesson is far more important: friendship must never be treated as free operational capacity. P helped me in ways that went far beyond an ordinary favour, and I recognise that much more clearly today than I did in the middle of the process. He spent time dealing with a problem that belonged to me. He physically handled the consequences of decisions I had postponed for years. He became frustrated and his family became frustrated because the burden was real. Their frustration was justified.
That does not diminish my gratitude. It is the reason the gratitude is so deep.
I do not want to tell this story as though P cheerfully spent years solving my problems without inconvenience or cost. That would be a comfortable version for me, but it would not be honest. What he did required time, patience and effort. There were moments when it was too much. There were moments when I asked too much. Recognising that is part of recognising what he did for me.
I will always be grateful to him. Not simply because he helped empty two storage units or because he eventually sent a package to Moldova, but because he helped me close a chapter of my life that I was unable to close from Europe. He became the bridge between the person who left New Zealand in 2017 and the person who eventually received those last pieces of history in Moldova in 2026.
There is no invoice for that kind of help.
The final lesson is perhaps the hardest one for someone who tends to preserve things: letting go is not the same as losing everything. For years I thought that if I disposed of the computer collection or abandoned furniture or destroyed documents, then I had somehow failed to complete my relocation properly. I had imagined that success meant physically transferring the past intact into the future.
I no longer think that.
A possession should not become a permanent obligation simply because it once mattered. The purpose of my old computer collection was not to make me pay storage fees indefinitely. The purpose of old furniture was not to force an international freight operation years after I had stopped needing it. The purpose of family photographs was certainly not to remain sealed inside a box in New Zealand forever.
What mattered was identifying the things that could not be recreated and preserving those.
That is what finally happened.
Closure
I left New Zealand at the end of 2017 expecting that my belongings would follow once I had settled in Europe. I moved from Ireland to Germany in 2019, found long-term accommodation, encountered the pandemic, discovered an expired customs deadline, postponed the problem, paid years of storage, tried to sell a major computer collection remotely, investigated recycling, relied far too heavily on the generosity of a friend, closed the storage units, confronted another hundred kilograms of documents, investigated secure destruction, considered flying back to New Zealand simply to sort paper, and eventually reduced the entire problem to the things that still genuinely mattered.
Then a DHL package crossed the world from New Zealand to Moldova.
When it arrived in late August 2026, I finally understood that I had spent years thinking about the problem in the wrong way. I had always described it as moving my belongings from New Zealand to Europe. That was not really what I needed to do. I needed to decide which parts of my old life still belonged in the new one.
It took me almost nine years to answer that question.
In the end, very little of the original volume made the journey, but the most important things did: documents, photographs, memories and continuity with the people and places that came before. Behind that small package sits something even more important than anything inside it: the knowledge that a friend thousands of kilometres away repeatedly helped me when he had no obligation to do so.
When I look at those photographs and documents now, I do not think primarily about the furniture, computers and other possessions that never made it out of New Zealand. I think about the fact that the chapter is finally closed, that the history worth preserving survived, and that I was extraordinarily fortunate to have a friend like P helping me bring it to an end.
Where relevant, factual and regulatory references were checked against the sources cited in the article. AI assistance does not replace professional legal, regulatory, financial or technical advice, and the final selection, interpretation, opinions and conclusions presented here remain my own.
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