Finally, a conservatory we can sit in

Our conservatory furniture was delivered this week. Here's a couple of pictures (ignore the boxes of DVDs waiting to be unpacked!). They were taken first thing yesterday morning so the sun is quite bright, but I couldn't close the blinds because it would make the room too dark and there are no mains lights in there. I bought a standard lamp after work yesterday (which gave Rob the perfect opportunity to recommence his musings on why it's called a 'standard' lamp and not a 'standing' lamp), and it looked really cosy in there last night with the light on. Not that I did much sitting in there last night, because I was watching TV in the lounge, but I will definitely be spending a lot of time in there in the mornings when the sun is on the back garden.

After a month or so of being busy every weekend and not being able to do any more unpacking, I finally got round to sorting out the spare room a bit more last weekend. I unpacked the boxes of coats and out-of-season clothes and put them in the spare room cupboard. Then I filled a chest of drawers with stuff from another box, and I still have three boxes left to unpack and nowhere to put the contents...

We've decided that the next step in the moving process hinges on getting Wayne, our friendly neighbourhood man with a van, to come round and clear the garage of all the boxes we've accumulated over the past month. He already came round once, about 3 weeks after we moved in, and took away a van load of rubbish, and we now have at least a van and a half's worth of boxes sitting in the garage taking up space. We concluded that we aren't going to use the garage to keep a car in (Rob's won't fit for one thing, and there's plenty of room on the driveway for our two cars and two more), so we should get some units put up in there to store the stuff that's still in boxes. So we now need Wayne to come round and take the boxes away so we can see how much space we have for shelving units etc.

Yesterday was 2 months to the day since we moved in and we're still not sorted...! But we're making progress - we bought a bathroom last weekend which we're hoping will be fitted while we're on holiday or very soon afterwards.

More Pictures

Here's the latest round of pictures of the house. This is the den before it was decorated (and while we were still using it as a store room).





Here it is again, after its makeover, from the same angle:







and from the other side of the room. Rob's Dad did the painting; mine did the flooring. Just need to get some furniture in there now...





Here's our bedroom, which isn't the largest bedroom in the world, but we chose this house because it had lots of living space downstairs, so we'll only be using the bedroom for sleeping. Sounds like a silly thing to say, but Rob used to spend a lot of time in our huge bedroom in the old house watching DVDs on his laptop when I was watching the TV downstairs, but he has the den for that now.

Again, Rob's Dad did the painting; my Mum made the curtains and my Dad made the door fit back into the frame!





This is the view into the en suite from the bedroom - we'll be having the whole room refitted so this will serve as a 'before' shot.






Finally, here's a picture of the spare room, which is the largest of the bedrooms, and if it weren't for the fact that our room has the en suite bathroom, I would happily have this room as the main bedroom. We haven't decorated in here; I quite liked it how it was so I just bought bedding to match.


My parents left today; as well as laying the flooring in the den, they also painted the utility area while they were here, and put up some pictures, and cooked two barbecues, and assembled the TV unit and the bedroom furniture... thanks Mum & Dad!

Nearly There...

We've had a couple of weeks of limbo in the house - after the initial unpacking was over, we reached a point where we couldn't unpack any more stuff until various other things happened - for example, we can't unpack stuff into the spare room because it's already full of Rob's clothes, and we can't move them out of there and into the main bedroom until the bedroom furniture is delivered and assembled, and there's no point in assembling bedroom furniture until after the new carpet has been fitted, and so on...

The bedroom carpet was fitted today, and I've made a start on assembling the furniture - a super king-size bed, chest of drawers, wardrobe and 4 under-bed drawers. The carpet's really nice, lovely and thick, but a side-effect of that is that the door doesn't open and close over the top of it, so I've asked my Dad to bring his planer with him so we can shave a little off the bottom of the door. Mum and Dad are arriving this evening and staying into the middle of next week - Dad's going to lay laminate floor in the den tomorrow while Mum and I finish putting up bedroom furniture. Once the flooring's done in the den we can move the big TV back in there from the dining room, and put up the AV unit that has been in the conservatory for the last couple of weeks...

We also had two bookcases, a coffee table and a nest of tables delivered on Tuesday for the lounge. These are now in place and I unpacked 6 boxes of books onto the bookcases yesterday. Things are finally starting to come together - pictures after the weekend.

Reconnected

What did we ever do before we had the internet? I had quite a frustrating week last week without it - I couldn't do my work properly because lots of our systems, including bookkeeping and file sharing, are web-based; I couldn't look up the name and number of a local plumber and a burglar alarm company, and the previous people didn't leave their Yellow Pages; I had to use the phone - the phone! - to book tickets for Harry Potter on Saturday (brilliant, by the way). Still, that's all over now, because our broadband was connected today.

Lots of people have asked to see pictures of the new house, so here they are. I haven't taken any of the upstairs yet, because it's still quite chaotic up there - we stripped the wallpaper off the walls of the main bedroom at the weekend in preparation for it being decorated next week; the rest of the rooms are still full of boxes so there's not much to see yet, but I'll take some pictures when it's all finished.

It's ridiculously difficult to take pictures of entire rooms, but I've done my best. First, there's the outside of the house, which you might have seen already on my previous post, but here's another one taken in better weather.




The window downstairs on the left in the above picture is the one you see here in the lounge.






This next picture is taken from the doorway in the previous picture, showing the other side of the lounge and the double doorway through to the dining room.





Here's the dining room from the other side, looking through to the lounge. The table won't stay against the wall - once it's in the middle of the room, I think there's room for an upright piano against that wall. Just need to start saving my pennies now...



Then there's the kitchen, first taken from the dining room doorway:






Then from the conservatory doorway. The conservatory is currently empty - we've ordered furniture for it today which will be delivered in 4-6 weeks, so again, I'll take pictures when it's furnished.




There's another room downstairs - the garage used to be double-length and the previous owners converted the back half into an office, and Rob's going to use it for his den, but again, it's not decorated yet and there's no furniture.

Rob's Mum and Dad are coming to visit this weekend, then they're staying the rest of the week as his Dad's a decorator. He's going to tackle as many rooms as he can in the week then we'll get someone in to do the rest.

More pictures to follow...

We're Here!

We arrived at 15:00 on Friday afternoon and spent all weekend unpacking. We now have a working living room, dining room, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom, so at least we can function properly... The conservatory is full of boxes, as is the garage and one of the bedrooms, but we'll just have to get around to that when we can. The downstairs is bigger than I remembered it - I thought we might have problems getting our massive sofas in the living room but it's fine. We took a break from unpacking on Saturday to look for some reclining chairs for Rob's den and some furniture for the conservatory - we've found some potential candidates but have a few more shops to look in before we decide.

We don't have broadband at the moment (will be up in a week) so I'm at Adrian's house, catching up on e-mails and doing some work. His kids have just arrived back from school so I don't think I'll get much done now - in fact, I'll probably just give up and watch Tweenies or something...

More later.

(Slight) Change of Plan Again

We're all packed up and waiting for the removals men to arrive. I called the company earlier on and asked them where they would be storing our stuff overnight - I was told when I made the booking that they would pack everything except our bed today, then come back for the bed first thing in the morning and go straight off to Southampton after that. The guy on the phone today told me that the van would be stored in a lorry park with 24-hour security. Which is great, except the lorry park is in Southampton. So there was a lot of confusion when I asked why they would be driving 230 miles to the lorry park today, only to come back again in the morning for our bed...

The van they have sent is not a sleeper van, and clearly the message about coming back in the morning has not filtered through. So we have had to take down our bed and the removers (if they ever get here - they left Southampton at 06:30 this morning for a journey of 6 hours, including two decent breaks, and it's now 15:00 and they haven't turned up yet) will pack all our stuff up tonight and drive it down to Southampton, then we just need to call them tomorrow when we're about an hour away and they'll bring the van round to the new house.

So we've had to book a room at the local Premier Travel Inn for tonight (for which the removals company will reimburse us). Which is no big deal, but we feel a bit robbed of our 'last night in the old house'! And it also means that I won't have internet access after they've packed the router etc, so I'd better get this posted now. More news in a few days when we've got broadband set up at the new place...

Surrounded by Boxes

Not much to report, except that we've been packing since last Monday and are nearly there now. We've given 6 bin bags full of clothes and 3 bin bags of shoes to charity, thrown out a car full of stuff we don't need any more (and have another car full to take this week), and got rid of a LOAD of out-of-date food. We just have the garage to do now, then the rest of the stuff will have to wait until Thursday when the removals company arrives. My lower back aches after I've been packing boxes for a few hours but Rob and I are doing the exercises on his Easing Back Pain CD most days so it's not as bad as it could be - and nowhere near as bad as it was last time we moved.

On the running front, I've done my route another three times, so that's four times I've run the entire route (and another twice I've walked part of the way). Yesterday morning I found it really tough, though, and was a bit slower than my last couple of times. My calves started hurting not long into the run and were killing me by the end - had to do lots of stretches when I finished. I still don't like this running malarkey but I will stick at it for a while longer yet...

Scratch that... change of moving date

Last Friday I posted that we would be moving house in a week. I then had a call from my solicitor around noon that day, saying that our vendors, the ones who have already completed on another purchase and are only staying on in the house until we need them to move out, are refusing to complete on 29 June. Something about not being able to find a removal company... Out of all the things we anticipated could go wrong in this whole process, our vendors didn't even feature in our list - the agent told us they'd have moved out long ago.

Needless to say I was not entirely happy about that, given that we'd spent most of the previous week getting ourselves into a position where we could complete this Friday so as to fit in with our buyers and their buyers. Sure, it was difficult to find a removal company for me too, and I had to ring 24 of them before one said they had availability, but I managed it in the end. Obviously our buyers weren't too pleased either, because they had done similar things to get themselves in a position to move out on 29 June, including booking a removal company and taking time off work.

Long story short, although they're not all happy about it, everyone in the chain has now agreed on a completion date of 6 July (which was my preferred date all along, so I've got back a week in Manchester and don't feel nearly so stressed about everything now). And our solicitor has just called to say that contracts have been exchanged, so there's no backing out now; everything is set!

Stupid English house-buying system... there has to be a better way.

We're Moving in a Week!

Our house purchase has progressed very quickly - our searches are done, our solicitor has received the contracts from the vendor's solicitor and we've got our mortgage offer - so we're in a position to complete. Ideally I would have liked to complete on 6 July, but our purchasers are pushing for completion by the end of June and seeing as we are able to complete next Friday, we've agreed to move out on 29 June.

I'm excited about moving, but at the same time I feel a bit harassed, because I've lost a week of time I thought I had in Manchester, and there's so much to do and so many people I'd like to see before I go. We had a really hard time finding a removals company with availability at less than 2 weeks' notice, but we managed to find one in the end. We're going to visit Rob's Grandma and Grandad on Saturday morning and he has a race in Manchester on Sunday morning, but the rest of the time between now and next Friday will be spent packing things up and seeing as many friends as possible to say goodbye. Wish us luck!

And the Winner is...

16 Coltsfoot Close, Hedge End, Southampton. We went down to Southampton this weekend and viewed 20 houses - 9 on Friday and 11 on Saturday - and we found the perfect house, so we put in an offer and it was accepted! It has four bedrooms, the smallest of which we'll use as an office, then a lounge, dining room, kitchen, conservatory and extra room downstairs, which we'll use as a den for all Rob's console-related activities, with a big screen TV on the wall, comfy sofas, bean bags etc. The garden is lovely - not too big, with lots of sun in the afternoons - and the best part is that the current owners are moving out in two weeks regardless of whether the house is sold or not, so our chain stays quite short. So as long as we can keep our solicitor moving quickly on the purchase, we should be able to move in sometime in July, in time for the office opening on 1 August. It was a long weekend, but I'm so glad we've found a house we like! I also got a chance to see the new office in Chilworth (from the outside, at least), as well as the plans for the inside of the office, which is just one big space at the moment. It all looks great, and I'm looking forward to working and living in Southampton!

One Step Closer to Moving

Rob's company is more than tripling the size of its UK operation over the course of the next few months - there are currently 11 employees and they'll be hiring 25 or so new people. Rob and his colleague Adrian are going to be responsible for managing these new recruits into the product development division, and they decided that this job would be far easier if they didn't live 250 miles apart and could actually work from the same office. So we're moving to the south coast.

We put our house on the market on 19 March and the closest we came to a viewing was someone arranging an appointment then cancelling and saying she would re-schedule, but she never did. On 19 April, 4.5 weeks after we instructed the estate agents, I decided to call them the following Monday and ask why no one had come round to view the property and if there was anything I could do to make it more saleable. Then I got a call from the agent that afternoon arranging a viewing for Sunday, which went very well. Then on Monday the agent rang to arrange another viewing for that evening, and on Tuesday morning we got a full asking price offer from the second couple!

Now all we need to do is find somewhere to live in Southampton... It's not very easy to do that, being up here, so we think we might rent somewhere for a while until we get a feel for the area. Also, we don't actually have an office down there yet - it is likely to be in Chilworth, but it's not 100% yet, so it wouldn't be wise to buy somewhere just yet, in case it turns out to be a long way from the office.

We're working towards a moving date of end of June/early July. The date for getting the new office up and running is 1 August.