We moved house again
I feel like I’ve been gone for ages. A lot of life happened, we finally found a place to live, the virus pandemic got worse, there was a bit of a delay before we could move in, but we eventually managed it.
We were initially told we wouldn’t have internet until June, because nobody was prepared to come out and install it for as long as they expected the UK to be on lockdown, although in the end it happened a couple of weeks after we moved.
The internet situation is very strange here; a company I’d never heard of called See the Light has exclusivity over the newbuilds here, other companies cannot install their cables here; I’m not sure exactly what stops them or how long that’s meant to last for. The development is around 10 years old as far as I know. The way their router plugs into the house is also really weird.
There was a lot of stuff I was worried about not being able to do without having internet on my laptop, stuff like ordering new pet tags, changing my address with various entities, keeping up with my tribunal etc. but luckily it did get sorted out.
Andover hasn’t quite loosened it’s grip on us and we are now within the parish boundary of Smannell. We live in one of those strange 3-storey constructions. We’ve lost a room from upstairs and downstairs, and the kitchen is absolutely tiny. The whole house is not even 5 metres wide, and such narrow houses are a major gripe of mine when it comes to floorplanning and housebuilding. And as we’re now living in one of them, we’ve had to put most of our stuff into storage, and that costs money.
Our plan is to scrape money together over the next 12 months or so and pay a deposit on a shared-ownership house that will fit us. It would be nice to buy the house that we looked at in Winchester if it is still available by then. The price has already fallen since the pandemic ramped up, so if we had successfully bought it before, we would already be in negative equity. Maybe everything happens how it does for a reason and whatnot.
So many things cost money in the first month of being in a new house though, I’m pretty sure we won’t meet our saving target this month. Loads of little things like, our shower rail refused to stay up so I bought screw-in supports for it, we needed a proper box to put our tools in because they were fucking everywhere, I had to get a tension rod to hang our shower rack on over the bath because there’s no screen, my TableMate broke in the move so I got a new lap desk, things like that slowly bleeding all the money. Next month we need to replace our existing desks with a 2m Linnmon from Ikea and get some Kallax storage for underneath it.
There seems to be no Freeview signal here either, and the management company don’t want to send someone during the pandemic, so we might need to look into Freesat although this would also require a person, to come and install a dish. Sadly our Virgin box doesn’t work here, and when we buy a shared-ownership newbuild it’s likely we won’t be able to use Virgin there either.
Anyway, there are issues with this house, and it’s a shame that we couldn’t stay 3 years at the last one, but we’re glad to be in, and finally out from under all the idiots involved with that house. From the agents who lied to our faces that it was a pet-friendly rental (I curse your very existence, Langdown) to the guy doing an inspection who took a photo of me asleep on the sofa and included it in the report, every single one of them was a fucking moron.
Our landlords got to live here, on the water in California, while they spitefully made our lives a nightmare.
Here are some photos from before and after the move.
The day my rental stairlift had to be uninstalled was genuinely sad. I truly miss it. I didn’t realise how much it improved my life until I had to start crawling up the stairs again. Fuck, that really takes it out of me, it’s bizarre how long it leaves me without energy for.
We’re vaguely hoping to have it reinstalled in this house (and there’s enough space at the bottom of the stairs that it wouldn’t need a hinged rail this time), but it’s a case of money.
A great technique for nailing things to the wall is as follows:
Be wary of how you size where your thing is going because if you use the tape to mark the distance between the holes and the ends of the item, it will of course be displayed backwards on the wall. You are only looking at the distance between the two (or more, maybe) fixing points, which are the same amount apart even when flipped (hopefully).
I’m on a bit of a weird sleep schedule owing to the fact that my migraine botox is long overdue. I got a letter saying my pain management operations are cancelled for the time being. It’s completely understandable and correct, but at the same time some of the pain I’ve been in is completely grim. I just go through periods of not being able to think straight, not functioning at sensible hours, and I know I’ve got another one coming because I can’t finish my own sentences right now, I involuntarily stop in the middle and take ages to start talking again. My brain is on fire.
So yeah, we’ve moved, life is generally unstable for everybody, not sure when we’ll be able to see our friends again, but hopefully everything will be OK.
