THURSDAY 19 0CTOBER     WE HAVE A NEW HOME

Excitement made it impossible to sleep later than 8am.

We breakfasted, packed the camp table and chairs into the back of the Terios, put in the awning, disconnected the water to Bus. It would be staying here without us for a few days.

Our solicitors had said settlements on our old place – and then on the new – were scheduled for 11am. By 10.30 we and dog were in the Terios, parked at the sports ground across the road from the new place, waiting … and waiting. I couldn’t help but worry about some last minute glitch.

John filled in the time by walking the dog on the grassy oval. I watched them, clutching my phone, waiting on notification that all was well.

At 11am, two removal trucks pulled up outside the house. One contained the house contents packed yesterday, the other those from storage. A lot of “stuff”.

Removalists were right on time. The legal processes were not. It was a very long 45 minutes after 11am, when we got the expected phone call. All done, new home was ours.

The removalists were into the place before us!

All the boxes of household goods were well labelled so once they got the hang of the house layout, the trucks were rapidly emptied. Daughter was still on leave from work, so she arrived to help with unpacking. Her priority was to get beds set up and made, so we would have somewhere to collapse at the end of the day.

Couey spent a few hours out on the patio, tethered to a post, still being confused.

John had immediately headed to his new shed, in order to direct the unpacking of the shed boxes that had been shovelled together yesterday morning. He would have time to ponder best layouts before the big stuff arrived next week. At least in this new place, there was a wide straight gravelled driveway right up to the shed.

Easy access to this shed.

The removal trucks were gone by 2pm. I had chosen Allied Pickfords for the job because I knew that firm did all the uplifts, storage and moving for our diplomats and government staff relocating between overseas posts. John’s daughter had been moved by them several times. I was confident in their professionalism. They lived up to my expectations and then some, giving us a seamless transition – packing, storage, moving – and were very pleasant to boot. There was only one damaged item – an ordinary terra cotta garden pot, that had been put in loose at the last minute, and which mattered not at all. I couldn’t fault them – and the overall cost, considering the complexity of it all, was very reasonable.

By the time daughter left to collect the boys from school, we had rooms full of boxes, a place to sleep tonight, and an unbelievable number of “kitchen” and “living room” boxes piled up on our big redgum dining table and any other flat surface in the room. We also had the camp table and chairs set up out on the patio, so at least we had a flat surface on which to rest food and drink.

John suggested he go and buy a cooked chicken from the local  supermarket. There was no way the kitchen was ready for anything other than making tea and coffee, so I gratefully made an exception to my cooked chicken rule.

We sat out on the patio and ate our chook – with our fingers. The overhead fans cooled down the quite hot late afternoon. We discovered there were coloured lights strung around the area, so we turned those on for a festive note.

Poor Couey was discovering that she no longer had any lawn to ablute on – just gravel and pebbles! Her feet would have to toughen up.

We talked about how it was so good to be sitting outside at our home whilst noticing how fresh the air smelled. Just like when we’re travelling away from Melbourne. It was only now we were realising how polluted with vehicle emissions the air had been at our old home, with busy roads nearby. This was bound to be healthier.

Our outlook from the patio featured tall eucalypts in the distance. Good to have trees around us again; over the past few years just about all those that had originally been in the vicinity at the old location had been cut down to make way for development.

Despite our exhaustion, I found it hard to sleep soundly that first night. I realised next day this was because it was so quiet. We no longer had the pervasive, background hum of the almost constant traffic, drifting up the hill from the main connector road below. Seemed a bit ridiculous, not being able to sleep because of the silence!