The Big Day Is Upon Us – Packing Up Our Belongings!
You’d think having moved house six or seven times in the last 12 years I’d be a dab hand at packing – not so it appears.
Of course I thought I had it all under control until my brother-in-law Colin, who is the most organised person I know, came to check proceedings. As he wandered from room to room his face became ever more alarmed – he said “are you sure you’re ready?” I replied that I was positive – he indicated with sharp intake of breath that he wasn’t convinced – “It’ll be fine” I assured him – “Trust me”.
I’d been packing the house and transferring our stuff for several weeks – in my head. When it came to packing a three bedroom house into a 30′ motorhome the reality was a bit more frightening. Suddenly I had to find somewhere for two sofas, a king sized bed, Christmas tree, pictures, bookcases, family photos, Jacks baby box and not least of all my beloved Terry Bradley print.
We were so “fortunate” to have sons who were more than willing to take most of this “stuff” off me – I don’t know of another Queen’s University student who is sleeping on a king-sized leather sleigh bed with a Terry Bradley signed print hanging above it. I did take my memory foam mattress with me though – some things are non-negotiable Jack 🙂 Having “donated” various bits of furniture etc to family and cadging some loft space off my sister and garage space off my dad, by Thursday night we were ready to move the rest of the stuff into the van. To get a comfortable mattress for such occasions one can Visit website to find out more.
The day started early (08.30) for us – I suggested we might take one room at a time – decide what was going with us and move it to the van, then clear the rest of the room – bearing in mind that we’d already sorted the stuff were keeping, I set about dumping almost everything else.
Alan’s hoarder instinct came crashing to the fore so he spent some time following me round asking “whats in that bag? Won’t we need that?”. Eventually we ended up with enough bags to warrant 4 trips to the dump – I’m sure there will be something I’ve dumped that I’ll be desperate to find in the future but I’ll deal with that when it happens 🙂 like I usually do!
We’d booked into the local motorhome/caravan park for a few days and decided the other occupants wouldn’t appreciate our 7.5 tonne truck arriving at 11pm so we embarked on our first ever motorhome journey, all 4 miles of it, and parked in our allocated pitch – excited at the prospect of spending our first night ever in the van. Yes that’s right, we’ve had the van for more than 18 months, were planning to travel round Europe and had never spent a night in it – sure whats the worst that could happen 😉
At 7pm we decided to break for something to eat and took ourselves off the Brewers Fayre for some dinner – and two Baileys lattes each just to smooth out the ragged edges of the day, before returning back to the house to grab some final items. We finally finished the move at 12.30am and retired to the van exhausted.
As first nights go it was uneventful – I slept like the dead as usual, no doubt Alan had his normal fitful sleep. We wakened as fresh as could be expected and spent half an hour just “realising” what we’d done – essentially apart from the van we were homeless! Of no fixed abode!
It wasn’t how we’d planned it since we had thought we would be away by the end of September at the latest but my dad had been unwell and was in hospital several times in the previous months and had another procedure in the coming days, so I wanted to wait until he was over that. Unfortunately our landlord needed the house vacated so we decided to stay on a site for a few days, hold onto the car and just gather ourselves for the road ahead.