Move on up now

Finally the story of the move, grab a coffee…or a vodka, you might need it. So regular readers will know we’ve moved house, it wasn’t through choice but it’s the joys of renting a house, when the rent goes beyond your means you have to move. It was looming in the background for a long time but we were looking for a house with a downstairs bedroom as Jono can’t manage stairs with his back problem. Those kind of houses are as rare as hens teeth and we really wanted to stay in the same village as after 23 years it would have been a big wrench to move further afield.

Anyway eventually a bungalow came up for rent and it suited us down to the ground…plus it has a greenhouse! I was ridiculously excited by that even though Andy thinks it’s a one minute wonder….I seem to remember him thinking the same when I picked up a camera…..watch this space. Actually he can’t think it too much of a novelty because he’s dug me a vegetable patch (more on that in another blog). Back to the move.

I have to say I didn’t want to move, I loved the house we were in and we’d made it our own including painting it yellow (it was pink when we moved it!), all with the landlords consent and with our own money. I hated the garden which was more of a swamp and took almost two hours to cut the grass…not fun. So we had a month of packing, in which time I got ill and also had to go to Manchester with Jono. So the bulk of the packing was left to Andy and Lucy. The couple of boxes I did pack got emptied just as quickly by Rocket-dog who didn’t like the upheaval at all. Luckily Lucy is an ace packer, she has it down to a fine art like a giant game of tetris, in the end she was so good at it I left it to her. Thanks Lucy!

After what seemed like a very long month of packing and waiting, the day of the move came. We went and picked up the keys and were going to hire a van, it seemed like a good idea and it would have been if my insurance company didn’t want to charge me €106 just to change my car insurance over to the van for one day!! Thanks One Direct but no thanks. You see Noel Gordon rent-a-van (lovely people) only rent the vans, they don’t deal with the insurance, they were very helpful but we just couldn’t afford that on top of the van rental.

So there we were with just Gilbert, the green getz. I did have visions of me traipsing through the village with all our worldly goods in a wheelbarrow…but then I remembered we don’t have a wheelbarrow! So Gilbert got piled high with all our shite stuff including a king size mattress tied to the roof of the car. At one point I drove through the village with a giant gnome hanging out of the boot, I’m sure some of the villagers are still suffering whiplash – they turned around so fast. Thankfully we were only moving from one side of the village to the other. After what seemed like 400 trips we finally got everything moved.

One of the first things that needed doing was the washing machine needed to be plumbed in, Andy is great with anything like that so he was able to do it…but the pipe fell apart and there was a mains water leak. Lucy and I were up at the old house and we got a garbled call from Jono so we quickly came back to find Andy with his finger shoved down the pipe to stop the water. We frantically ran around looking for the water mains (and the handle to turn the mains off), both were located but the stop cock was covered in mud – my arm was too fat to fit down the hole (I didn’t think me getting stuck would be the best idea), so there was Lucy up to her shoulder fecking pulling mud out of the hole as fast as she could. It didn’t help that she was almost out in the middle of the road as that’s where the mains is and that two cars pulled up to ask her where the nearest church was (maybe they thought she was praying) and some gobshite asked if we were digging for oil (so funny – not).  It’s at times like this a video would have been great. Finally the stop cock (that’s an unfortunate name) was uncovered and the water was turned off so the pipe could be repaired.

Panic over. Until the next day when Andy was going up into the loft. The loft door happens to be in the bathroom so in his wisdom he locked the bathroom door so no one would walk in and knock him off the ladder. All would have been fine if the ladder didn’t fall over! We could hear him yelling so when we looked through the bathroom window all we could see were his legs hanging from the loft door and the ladder on the floor. I somehow convinced myself that I could climb through the 3 inch window opening and retrieve the ladder…of course when I realised my head couldn’t get through that wasn’t an option. Luckily Andy managed to turn into some kind of spiderman (I never knew he was that flexible!) and kick open the cupboard in the bathroom and climb down the shelves…another panic over.

Let’s hope there’ll be no more dramas (or no more moves) for a while although I have to say I found it all very amusing, especially the loft door bit (yes I know I’m warped). Even though I didn’t want to move I feel very settled here already, so that’s good. One day I might even unpack.