Moving is hard.
We are in the process of relocating from a comfy, reasonably well maintained apartment (with some serious electrical issues) to a larger, much much less well maintained house on the other side of the river. For some reason the phrase about Lydia and Wickham at the end of Pride and Prejudice keeps popping into my head- they keep relocating to find a more comfortable situation (translation – they are always looking for cheaper rent on a better place). Well that is certainly a factor.
The place we are moving to is much cheaper, is larger and actually is a house, as opposed to a unit in a block with a very nosy and complainy neighbour. But, it in a much more serious state of disrepair- the lino in the dining room (and we have a dining room, off the kitchen, not a stupid “combined living/dining area”, which for the record real estate people is NOT that great. Particularly when it is clearly only big enough for a two person kitchen table and not much else. Anyway, the lino in the dining room is ancient, harking back 50 or 60 years. Luckily the carpet in the rest of the house is a little more recent, and the 70′s era built in closets shoved into two of the bedrooms are pretty darn spacious. But there is peeling wallpaper, and a toilet attached to the back of the house (which pretty much indicates that this place was built before Brisbane was sewered in the 1970′s), and the living room is a tad on the small side. And the lights- well they make the current apartment look well lit! Not such a problem, we have a growing lamp collection.
I was reflecting (as we waited for the Energex guys) how much simpler it was a hundred years ago-you bought/rented the house & moved in. No stuffing around getting telephones, electricity and internet hooked up. Of those three, I think my husband was most concerned about the third. The electricity was important because the modem needs electricity to work. And we are fairly simple- didn’t need to worry about getting gas set up, or connecting foxtel.
It was a bit odd, the real estate agent lady was curious why we were renting- ie were we building elsewhere? No, we are not in the homeowner category yet, but we are obviously older than the average renter. oh well. It is a nice street (ours is the crappy house), and a nice neighborhood. And building? Ha, not in Australia anytime soon, although Japan seems to do it a bit faster…
Hopefully the space will allow us the opportunity to sort through some of the mountains of stuff, including the book collection (aka why we don’t have the money to buy a house).
Yep, so the week of moving has just begun- the weekend should be interesting.
