No, we are not about to move house again. Certainly not after all the blood, sweat and tears that have now gone into this cottage, not to mention the oodles of money. Although moving back south was another of my brother's crackpot ideas. Because of the difference in property prices, a move from south to north is usually a one way ticket and we have now decided that we do not want to move back south. We are going to stay here and enjoy the fruits of our labours.
I think that we have moved more times than has been good for us and I have noticed that there are several in blogland who are about to move house or who are trying to move house. So I thought that I would write a post about my/our moving experiences. My move into the one bedroom flat that was my first purchase doesn't really count as all I possessed, apart from clothes, records and books etc., was a cooker, a bed and a stool. Three years later I had outgrown the flat and moved on to a small house. My parents helped me move - well my father really, as my mother sat around fanning herself and complaining about the heat. On the advice of the removal man we tried to drive from the flat to the new house via a route that I was not familiar with and we got lost. The vendors had had the telephone disconnected in the days before mobile phones and it took several days of phone calls from phone boxes to get it reconnected and it was actually my father who eventually managed to get things sorted out. What would a girl do without her father?
I moved out of that house after I got married. The move itself was straight forward but I had the buyer from hell so we removed everything that we could. All my belongings went into storage for two weeks whilst we lived in my husband's house. We moved from my husband's house on St Valentine's Day to our first home. There were no problems with the move itself but we ended up spending a lot of time sitting around waiting for the money to go through in a cold damp multi-storey car park then waiting around outside the house in the rain for the vendors to get out of the house. By the time we were able to get into the house my husband had forgotten all about carrying me over the threshold. That evening we ventured out to find ourselves a take-away but in the dark and wet couldn't find one and ended up going to a restaurant for something to eat. By now we had forgotten that it was February 14. So there we were in our scruffy clothes amongst smartly dressed couples out for a romantic evening.
Another four and a half years later and we were on the move again. The removal company's estimator allowed for a removal van plus a small van but on the day the foreman decided that we didn't need the small van. And guess what - it didn't all fit into the removal van. The job had to be done in two trips and it was 8.30 pm before they finished unloading.
Seven years later we moved from Surrey to Chester at the end of the hot summer of 2003. The move started on a Monday with the B team. They were grumpy, disinterested and hungover. They managed to load unpacked suit cases on to the van and I had to asked for them to be unloaded. The local telephone directories also found their way on to the van and also had to be unloaded as the buyer had specifically asked for them to be left. In any case what use would Surrey phone directories be to us in Chester? About 2.30 in the afternoon they dumped a collection of travelling wardrobes in our living room and left. We were both so fed up with them that if it had not been for the fact that they had about three quarters of our belongings on the removal van, we would have happily told them not to come back. The following day the removal van was back this time with the A team who were everything that the B team had not been. Monday had been their day off after a removal trip to Europe. They managed to move us up to Chester and get us installed in the rented house without any problems.
After eight months of living in someone else's house we were desperate to move into a home of our own. By now we had mastered the art of moving. The only hitch was that one of our beds would not go round the bend at the top of the stairs in the cottage. It seems as if practise makes perfect but we are not planning on moving again any time soon.
Now read the sequel.