Today I was tasked with shipping a rather large and bulky package. How hard can this be? Short answer: very hard (if you don’t want to spent hundreds of EUR on it)

The object to be shipped is a rather stiff case. I thought I was well prepared with bubble wrap and some wrapping film. Oh boy was I wrong.

Took me about one hours to carefully pack the thing, wrap it first in bubble wrap and then in a couple of layers of wrapping film (like the one you might use in the kitchen to keep bowls of food fresh).

Went to the website of DHL (the shipping company of choice for this project) to check on the price and figured that the packaging material will have to be paper or cardboard to avoid the bulky load surplus charges.

Fortunately I still had some packaging paper large enough. Another round of wrapping and taping. Finally I put the monster into a large IKEA bag and trotted off to the nearest post office. Thats about 800m from here. Hauling this bulky thing which comes in at 15 kg is not as easy as one might imagine. The bag straps cut into my fingers and my arms are about 10cm longer now.

In the post office I learned another requirement for stuff you want to ship at lowest possible cost: it has to be box shaped so it can be stacked.

My package had one side with a hump and thus would again count as bulk load with a hefty surplus charge. As I’m frugal … I hauled the whole thing back home to organize a cardboard box large enough to contain the package and small enough to not exceed the shipping boundaries again.

In addition I 3D printed myself a bag strap holder to ease the cutting of the straps a bit. That came out rather nice and make a huge difference when carrying such heavy loads.

To be continued …