I have moved house once or twice.

*counts on fingers*

OK, make that about 26 times. (I didn’t have that many fingers obviously, I’m not a freak.)

In the course of my house moving marathon, I’ve picked up a few tips that help things go as smoothly as possible. Moving house is apparently one of life’s most stressful events, so it pays to be prepared. Here are my 6 top tips to help with your house move:

Plan ahead

Just as with any big event, planning ahead is crucial. Make a list of everything you know you need to do and assign a timescale to it. Some things, like setting up phone and broadband installation, should be scheduled as early as possible to make sure you get the appointment you want, other things, like reading the meters, have to be done on the day. McCarthy’s have a really useful house moving checklist if you’re a complete newbie and aren’t sure what even needs to be on a list. View Post

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The big day is nearly here. Tomorrow I am leaving Bristol.

Although the last couple of months have felt like forever, moving has at the same time crept up on me and I suddenly feel like I have an awful lot to do and not enough time to do it in. I have spent the last half an hour running up and down the stairs with boxes and bags, hoping to clear my mind of the worry and the doubt, but still it lingers.

Moving under any circumstances I know is hard. You spend so long building up a life around you, collecting stuff, surrounding yourself with things, and then suddenly there it is, just a stack of boxes. You literally have to pick up every single thing you own, see it, put it in a box, take it out again. You unpack, try to recreate what was there before, or maybe something different, but what does any of it even mean?

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These things of course are more than just things – they represent interests, hobbies, passions and shared memories, which is why I suppose that having to look at every single one of them, when so many of the memories are no longer shared, is so sad.

Everyone keeps telling me that a fresh start is a good thing, that once we are in a new house everything will feel better, and I know that’s true, that feelings do fade, but I’m just not convinced I want them to.

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So here I am, about to move house again. This will be the fourth house I have lived in just in the lifetime of my blog and I’m heading for thirty in my lifetime as a whole. While I’m an old hand then when it comes to packing, this is quite probably the hardest move I have ever made and represents a significant crossroads in my life. I feel like the last two months have all happened outside of my control without me really meaning them to, and that things could so easily be so different.

(I do know that this isn’t actually how things happened, it just feels like it right now.)

crossroads

I’m moving for three key reasons, all stemming from the recent breakup.  View Post

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As a child I had some unusual interests. Aside from mine and my sister’s favourite game of Estate Agents, I liked designing nets and making boxes, creating colour coded homework schedules and rearranging my bedroom furniture.

The room reorganisations were the most fun.

I don’t want you imagining I took the process lightly though. There would normally be at least a room plan involved, and sometimes even a 3D scale model, including models of the individual items of furniture, so that I could try out a few options first to see how things fitted in different places.

It’s a wonder really I even had that one friend in secondary school. Or that I didn’t go on to have some fabulous architectural career.

The point I wanted to make though is that even if you have a small house, or in my case as a teenager just a bedroom, and can’t afford to move, doesn’t mean you can’t have hours of fun rearranging tiny cardboard pieces of furniture and, ultimately, life-size bits too if you want to really live the dream.

Here are some things you could try… View Post

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We have now moved house.

Thank God.

The day itself was just a teeny tiny bit longer and more stressful than I imagined. “It’ll be fine!” I was practically chanting in the weeks and days beforehand. “We’ll be all done by tea-time and by the next day it’ll be like we’ve lived there all our lives!”

*roars with laughter, verging on hysteria*

Picture me at 10.30pm, standing, shivering, in the pouring rain on the van rental forecourt, crying because I lacked the basic skills to back Boyfriend properly into a space rather than a nearby car. It was not a pretty sight. Boyfriend sent me home to bed at this point, fearing some sort of breakdown, and continued the ferrying of my bags and boxes of rubbish on his own in the car until 2am.

(He is very lovely indeed.)

Now it would be fair to say that our new house is a little bit smaller than our last house, but I’m not sure it warrants Bee nicknaming it the ghetto and singing this song around the house:

 

A bit harsh I would say.

This is the point at which I end with an amusing fact or witty sign-off but I am too tired and my hands still ache from all the carrying so instead I might just go for a little lie-down amongst the bin-liners.

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Tomorrow I am moving house.

In twelve hours time I will actually be picking up an actual van and having to fill it with all of the things in the house. All of them. Not just a few of them.

And then, to add insult to injury, I have to drive them half a mile around the corner and take them all out again.

Crazy times.

I thought, looking around the house when we first decided to move, that we didn’t have that much stuff. We’ve got rid of lots of furniture, as we’re moving somewhere smaller, and in my mind it was really just a sofa, a couple of beds and a few boxes of books. Oh deary, deary me, how wrong I was. We may not have masses of furniture, no wardrobes or big bookcases to speak of, but my God we have a lot of shite.

There are so many things that you just wouldn’t think of, that seem to blend into the house, so that you don’t notice them until you pile them all up in one room and stand back, aghast.

I’ve done a quick stock take of some of the things you might not normally consider, and we have:

  • 17 house plants
  • 12 outdoor plants in tubs
  • 43 framed pictures, including 4 large canvas prints
  • 3 bikes and 2 scooters
  • 3 printers. Who on earth needs 3 printers? We only have one desktop computer. It is quite ridiculous.

This is just a teeny tiny part of the list.

As we speak, my downstairs is piled floor to ceiling with the detritus that I have collected over the years and I am hiding upstairs in a now empty bedroom, afraid to look.

Wish me luck…

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On this very day, exactly one year ago, we moved to Bristol.

It was an interesting day. Boyfriend was working in another city for the weekend, and Bee had a Very Important Party that she simply couldn’t miss, so the moving crew consisted of just me, Belle, and two removal men that Belle and I not-very-affectionately referred to as The Chuckle Brothers.

As a seasoned housemover, I was well prepared when they showed up at our door at 9am on moving day. Everything was packed, rooms were cleaned, we were good to go. What I was not prepared for however was just how many breaks The Chuckle Brothers felt it reasonable to take during the day.

They were about ten minutes in, and had loaded up the cushions from the sofa, when I thought I’d better offer them a cup of tea. This, it turns out, was to be a big mistake. I thought they’d take their tea, and have quick slurps between items, but no. Cushions loaded, although not the sofa itself, they clearer felt they deserved a break already, and took their teas, rolled cigarettes, and spent the next fifteen minutes sat on the floor of the van having a nice little chat.

Goodness, I thought, I shan’t be offering them any more tea! (This is my idea of cracking the whip).

Half an hour later though, and I wasn’t left with much choice in the matter.

“Would you mind sticking the kettle on?” Barry, (or it could have been Paul), asked.

A stronger person might have said no, get on with your work, but I’m not terribly good at being assertive face-to-face, so instead I sighed and got out the teabags. They did have all of my stuff literally in their hands – I didn’t want them getting annoyed and ‘accidentally’ dropping things or scrapping any more paint of the walls than was strictly necessary.

The pattern continued throughout the day, and it was several hours before we were ready to leave, and then another three of four hours of intermittent unloading and resting at the other end.

And then they were gone, thanks God, and Belle and I were left in our new house.

It was exciting, but scary.

I had been planning the move for so long, pinning so many hopes on it, as though moving to Bristol was going to be the solution to everything. ‘When we’ve moved to Bristol…’ I must have said at least 100 times in the two years beforehand. There was a lot riding on this move for me, not least the fact that neither Bee nor Belle thought it was a particularly good idea.

As you would expect, those first few months were difficult. When life didn’t immediately become full of new friends turning up on the doorstep, and invitiations to exciting new events and opportunities, I had a little* panic. What if it was all a big mistake? Had I really been thinking of everyone’s best interests? Was city life really the best choice, or was I simply running away from something? From myself?

We’d been living in Bristol for about eight months when I had one of those moments that tips you into a new way of feeling. I was walking to an appointment, and bumped into someone I knew, someone I had made freinds with since moving to Bristol. This doesn’t sound like a big deal I know, but this was the first time I’d properly just happened upon someone in the street like that. Until then, all my meetings had been planned ones, but this was the moment where I thought ‘Wow, I casually know people!’

I walked away from that chance hello with a smile on my face, looking up and around me at the buildings and shops that now had that familiar feel to them, and I knew I hadn’t made a mistake.

That was the moment that Bristol began to feel like home.

*Quite big

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What makes your house your home? Is it the stuff we fill it with? The people we share it with? The street it sits on?

We are now at Moving Day minus eights days and counting. So far things are going well – roughly half our possessions are in boxes, a quarter have been dumped at the tip or the local hospice shop, and the remainder lie scattered about the house on various floors, ready to trip me up when I go to the toilet in the night.

I’ve always thought of myself as a seasoned housemover, and scoffed at people getting stressed by the seemingly simple task of packing. What’s not to love after all about the chance to reorganise your books? Every time I have moved house before, I have relished the opportunity to start afresh, with nice clean skirting boards and carpets, to be temporarily distracted from that permanent sense of mild boredom by the dilemma of how best to arrange the sofa and television. View Post

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I’ve always thought of myself as a reasonably organised type of person. I don’t have years of old newspapers piled in corners, hideously out of date clothes hanging in my wardrobe, or an attic full of faulty televisions and broken Christmas decorations. I’m not hugely sentimental and have never considered myself a hoarder.

Just recently though, I’ve begun to wonder whether this sense of orderliness has less to do with my personality, and more to do with the fact that I have moved house a lot. In my 32 years, I have lived in over 20 different houses. Moving so frequently, you just don’t have the time to build up collections of junk you don’t need. You’re forced to continually sort and review your possessions, and if you know you’re going to probably be packing, moving and unpacking within the next couple of years, it makes you think twice about holding onto things ‘just in case’.

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