The Builders Are Coming

The builders are coming. We’re having a clear-out.

About eighteen months ago we moved house. I was quite proud of myself, I started to pack non-essentials, get boxes from supermarkets/EBay etc., label them all and stack them in places where we could still access our living space, but also have other things ready for the move.

I can’t remember how many boxes there were, but I do know this. The removal men earned their money that day. We were in two minds about having the removal men come round – after all the new house was only a minute or so walk round the corner from our old house – but I’m glad we did. It was, in the end, a long haul.

One little trick that seemed to work well was to have all the rooms labelled (U1, U2, etc. for upstairs; D1, D2, etc. for down stairs), then have corresponding boxes for each of the rooms. This way we could get in, and not have to do much rearranging of boxes from room to room. It also meant that we managed to unpack and settle in within the three weeks before Christmas. (That was no mean feat I can tell you.)

But the builders are coming. And we have to get ready. Which means moving things around.

Again.

The glaziers have done a nice job – Howard Yarnold, if you need to know. Tidy, clean professional work. I like it when we find tradesmen who you can rely on to do good work. That’s why I like my builder (ok, so he’s not my builder, and it’s wrong of me to call him a builder, because he is multi-talented). You can tell that Paul, that’s his name, is good and reliable, because he’s difficult to get hold of.

Anyway, he’s coming to do an extension, so we have to ‘move house’ again. Only into different rooms, but it is still a move – partly because the downstairs office (with associated accoutrements, such as books, files, bookshelves etc.) is going upstairs; and the guest bedroom, will be going downstairs. Don’t ask. It’s complicated.

So the start of all this was to clear the ‘new’ office space, because the glaziers had to put in new windows. Now it’s all done, I’ll be transferring the DO (Downstairs Office) to the UO (Upstairs Office), one book at a time.

To be fair. It only took me about an hour and a half to move my vinyl collection (there’s not many), so we should be done by the end of next week, which is just as well – our HK visitors start arriving then. Great! They'll be able to make a start on chopping my firewood for the winter.

Now where did I pack that axe  sharpener...?