This posts includes: Many photos, moving house, our strange Artex, things I wrote on boxes, my birthday, and probably some other stuff.
As you know, we’ve been preparing to move house. Well, we finally moved at the weekend. It was a bit of an ordeal but I’m sure I’m going to tell you all about it.
That muscle I tore by my collarbone still hurts, a motherfucking lot. I’m now going into the 3rd week of sometimes unbearable pain. When I manage to get registered with a GP I think I am going to bring that up. I don’t know what they can do about it, though. People keep referring to it as my shoulder, though, and so even I’ve started saying “My shoulder hurts” even though it’s not my damn shoulder. It reminds me of the end of this Limmy sketch.
Mike and his dad (Will’s boss) helped with our move A LOT and even hired a van. They moved some stuff up to Andover on Friday night but the main moving day was Saturday. My mum and sister helped me clean and hoover the entire house, aside from most of the kitchen, which Will’s mum had already done. It got exhausting very quickly and even though it had been lovely living there, I was happy to be off by the evening.
Rob gave us a lift up to Andover, and I did very OK in terms of car sickness, just kept looking straight ahead and closing my eyes intermittently when I needed it. But when we got there, we couldn’t get in the front door. The key didn’t work. After a bit of panic and all three of us having tried, we realised we were using the front door key for our old house. Whoops!
I discovered from the pile of old post that one of the previous tenants was named Xhemile which is actually super interesting.
Our electricity and gas situation is a bit of a nightmare, they’re both done on pre-payment meters. Which wouldn’t be a problem in itself if it weren’t for the regular risk of the supply cutting out unexpectedly. Will managed to sort out the electric key, and a fair bit of the money put on had to pay off the debt the last tenants left. But we were without heating for a few nights because there wasn’t a gas key left and nor could we figure out where to even insert one. When we finally got a letter informing us of our supplier, Will tried to buy a gas card but nobody seemed to stock them. After spending half an hour on the phone with them, he was informed of the one location in all of Andover that stock this supplier’s cards, so we’ve now technically sorted the heating, although the radiators will only come on for 5 minute bursts and then you have to start the boiler again. I thought a boiler would be easier after the night storage heaters we had at the last house. We’ve asked to be put on a normal meter, anyway. We asked that of our electricity company too, but there is a “two month waiting list” to get off of their shitty pre-payment meters, which I don’t even think is a legal situation to put a customer with no debt history in, we’ll probably just switch.
Before moving, we called Virgin and told them we wanted to take our existing router with us. This was apparently all fine, as a Virgin socket was already installed in this house. Well, we get here, and there is no Virgin socket. Fast-forward to today and a man finally came to sort it out. Apparently the cable is just put through a hole in the wall without a socket here, and the Virgin man reckons that people from Sky butchered it when taking out the last tenant’s other cables.
I had trouble hearing the Virgin man today. I accidentally pulled a tube out of a hearing aid and cant fix it myself, so I’m going without them at the moment. He said “something something your neighbours, something something” and I was like “haha, um, I don’t know, haha,” and he said something else so I repeated pretty much the same thing. It almost definitely didn’t make sense and he probably thought I was mad.
Not having internet would have driven me totally insane when we first got here if it hadn’t been for my music playlist from 2015’s annual barbecue, full of lots of old Eurovision.
We had an incident on Sunday when Will went back to the old house to get some stuff that wouldn’t fit in Rob’s car; after he left I realised that he hadn’t taken the old house’s keys with him! But my mobile phone broke a while ago so I couldn’t message him, to get it to respond you had to wiggle a pair of tweezers inside, and even then it kept randomly crapping out. It wouldn’t turn on at all, so I rummaged in boxes to look for a USB cable. I found one, but the phone needed to charge for ages! It kept saying “sim card error” as well. It finally charged enough to respond to the wiggling of tweezers, but then Will turned up anyway, because he thankfully realised that he didn’t have the keys. I need to get a new mobile phone.
It’s about time we talk about THE ACTUAL HOUSE! It’s actually the first house we tried to get, and we got it, thank the Lord! It’s not as nicely finished as our last house was, there’s no denying that, but it’s nothing we can’t live with, save for some possible water pooling above our bedroom ceiling which we will need to investigate. The stairs are more thinly carpeted and shuffling up them hurts my bum, there are holes everywhere, the kitchen doesn’t have any in-built cutlery drawers. There is just some needless grime and mould around, frankly I do not believe for a second that the last tenants did an end-of-tenancy clean, and I want to ask the letting agent in person why they think this was a suitable condition to hand-over a house in, but like I said, it’s also not the worst thing ever and I don’t want you to think I don’t like the house, because I love it.
The living room is such a nice size for hosting and there is enough room for me to drive around almost everywhere in my chair ?!
Oh and also I am now 27 entire years old ?!
Our strange electric meter.
Presents!!
Me in my star pyjamas. Which weren’t a birthday present but were nice to wear on the day.
A necklace, of a purple cat! And my usual username is Purple Korat!
These relate to another cool thing further down, I dunno why I photographed them in this order.
A very lovely little journal!
Kadek’s contribution.
My sister got me these. Also a WHITE Toblerone which is the best Toblerone.
I have nice smell! Dunno why it’s named “Body Fantasies” though cos that’s a bit . . . weird.
Finally new headphones <3
MATE.
Will said when he saw these in the shop, he knew I would be excited by them. He was right. I love condiments so much.
This paper is also pretty damn nifty.
It’s a tradition that me and Kadek get each other Guylian.
My replacement medical bracelets are also here.
The garden. It’s smaller, but it has a brick wall which is good for dogs.
A shed.
Here is some Artex drawn by a drunk snail.
Not sure what went wrong over here, but the fact that it’s directly underneath the toilet upstairs make me think the ceiling may have come down at some point.
Random patterns without corresponding lights.
We have a local bean!
And a porch light, although I’m still not sure I know how to make it work properly.
I would like to put some lino over this.
At least our downstairs toilet has a window this time though.
Thankfully it doesn’t look like this anymore, but the first couple of days were very overwhelming.
Why.
Garden still isn’t properly set up yet.
Haven’t decided on which corner would be best for the toileting area.
A bird house!
Me wearing my alter ego.
One of the many excellent things I wrote on boxes. I like the pre-printed arrows that indicate the direction in which the smell travels, up your nostrils.
I’ve gotten quite adept at drawing farts if I do say so myself.
Thanks to our volunteer, the charity won a competition to receive some branded Dicky Bags! They odourlessly carry dog poo when there isn’t a bin nearby.
Sunset.
We paused on this freeze frame of Family Guy and I’ve never noticed that they do this with their outfits before, the leg lengths look wrong and it troubles me.
No idea what this even means.
Will interrupted me, so I got confused and wound up with the singular “pant.”
This Artex was created by dipping a hedgehog in paint and rolling it down the wall. Closer to the radiator, you can see that they gently patted the hedgehog on like a sponge.
Some mould that looks a bit like an eye.
There are nails and holes left everywhere so I strung my lights up.
Just needless grime really.
A missing handle.
The storage in this house is pretty great.
But also dirty.
And mouldy.
I understand this the least.
We have a hot water tank that seems to heat electrically and a boiler that is confusing.
Beautiful bobble lounging around.
Starting to come together.
Internet!
And here’s some pictures I took before moving, of the craft thingy I was making.
Archimedean drill makes better holes.
But, ta-dah! I made a tealight holder from an old peanut tin.
Patterns for all occasions!
Also our old daylight bulb from the lounge broke when I was wiping the grime from it :/
I’m trying to rope Will into having a housewarming soon, but it probably won’t be until January-ish. Clearly we were a beacon in your lives and will desperately miss us, but fear not because I am working on it.
