Week 3

Finishing Off Last Week

The front door has had its final topcoat and is looking quite a bit smarter.

🚪

The light fitting for the bedroom has arrived and been installed.

💡

I realised that I can’t spray paint through a radiator, so I removed it to paint behind it. I didn’t take an after photo, but you can bask in the glory of the various wallpapers.

Eurgh

Back to work

This week we had two days back at work. Going back was a bit of a shock after a few weeks of doing tasks as and when we wanted. Work is quite a bit less satisfying than crossing tasks off our house checklist.

Professional level ethernet wiring for the office

Working from home has its benefits though. One sunny afternoon we decided to walk into Bath and catch up on work in the evening. What a productive walk! We picked up our only Screwfix order of the week (new peephole for the front door), registered at the doctors, found our local escape rooms (obviously closed), and patronised a Pastel de Nata shop. Extremely tasty, and fortunately not too close to the house.

Movers

The big event of this week though is getting all our stuff moved from Harrow! We travelled down on the Wednesday night and got back to a very chilly Harrow. The movers arrived at 0800 and everything was packed and loaded by 1300! It was a complete whirlwind and I can’t say how glad I am that we got them to do the packing. I’m sure we would have gotten distracted by the things we were packing. Here are some videos of the Harrow house just so we didn’t forget it (I regret not having more photos/videos of the other places we’ve lived)

Back in Bath the next day the movers arrived at 0900 and unpacked everything by lunchtime. They weren’t too impressed by a 5 storey house. They did make one critical error though. They packed our stuff into two Lutons and obviously the tea things are the last things to be packed, but when they were unpacking they started with the Luton without the tea things in it! Fools! It probably meant that our unpacking went even faster though.

We can finally sit comfily!

📦📦📦📦 Boxes Boxes Boxes 📦📦📦📦

So now we’re living in a house full of boxes. 67 boxes to be precise. Plus a load of other things that don’t fit in boxes. We’ve been unpacking everything for quite a while now.

Things I’ve learned

• Opening boxes labeled “Ornaments and odds” is a mistake because we haven’t got a clue where they’re going to go
• For a household where only one person drinks hot drinks we have a ludicrous amount of cups and mugs (Nikki disagrees)
• We were very efficient at storing things in our old kitchen. Despite our current kitchen being bigger we’re struggling to find places to put everything
• Knowing that the current kitchen will be changed in the nearish future is a blessing when it comes to unpacking - There’s really no point trying to find the perfect layout
• Having the movers pack for you means that every box is a new discovery. Generally some variation on “Oh, I forgot we owned this” or “We should have thrown that out yonks ago”
• Having something to hunt for (speakers generally) is a good way of conning yourself into getting stuff unpacked and put away

There’s still so many things that we don’t have a home for yet. We planned to put some of the bookcases in the basement, but the ceiling isn’t high enough 🤦‍♂️ The music room is a complete mess. We haven’t figured out where the TV is going to live. There’s nowhere obvious to store the coats. And on and on and on 😁 We’ll sort it out eventually.

The true highlight of the week

Bathroom design

We’ve had the first design for the master bathroom back and we’re currently pondering it. Obviously they won’t give us proper diagrams until we pay them, so here’s a sketch of the general plan.

The Plan

The general idea is to split the bathroom into a WC and a wetroom. I think it works quite well, but we’re concerned about blocking the window from the doors. There’s a glass screen/wall between the toilet and the shower.

Other things

We’ve met another one of our neighbours. She came round with a lovely plant, but more importantly, we now know the names of the two guinea pigs that we can see from the back of the house (Squeak and Hazel)

Now that we’ve got our dehumidifier back I ran it in the utility room to see if getting it all damp proofed was going to be a waste of time. After several hours of continuous running the humidity got down to… 85%. Good thing we’ve got the damp-proofers coming in

We’re starting to think about when we fetch the cat. There always feels like there’s one additional project that it would make sense to wait for before the cat returns, but that isn’t fair on our cat-sitter. We’ll have to find places for all the cat things though, and close up all the floorboards I’ve pulled up…

We’re still getting used to having specific bin days, and someone shared this on Facebook and now we’ve got it stuck in our heads - we thought we’d spread the joy 😁

Not long before we can have some people visiting for garden parties 🥳