Just over two weeks ago we were still wondering where we would end up, and thinking about just choosing a place to move to that would be a compromise for all our needs. And then – we were offered this house.
There’s plenty of room for all we were looking for… although we’ll have to look at getting a mower again!
(That’s a nice washing line! 🙂 )
It’s a mixture of old and new – the house has a few years on it, but there’s some upgrades inside.
New paint, new kitchen…
Is this what they call a rain shower?
Downstairs has a waterfall tap with a colour changing light. Why? No one seems to know…
The garden is a bit weedy, and there are various figurines dotted about. Including a possible pet cemetery?
A gnome under the stairs…
There’s plenty of mint.
Some asparagus!
Even the weeds are pretty 🙂
It’s so quiet! We can hear the birds singing. And the weekend song of the lawn mower…
We’re still organising furniture, boxes…working out the new routines. But – we’re home! 😀
…and we’re reaching the end of the tunnel of house hunting and all the admin that goes with it (renting seems to be a difficult process these days, even when you can find a place. Lots of documents and procedures).
We’ve been finishing off the packing and organising for the move, and I’ve even managed a good chunk of cleaning. Tomorrow there should be enough people and large vehicles to make it all a bit quicker and easier 🙂 )
We’re all feeling quite weary already… but you know those “Thank you, God” prayers you breathe when things that look like they’ll be difficult suddenly work out? I’ve been saying quite a lot of those lately. YouTube has been helping me along with “out of the blue” suggestions.
Well, it’s an early start tomorrow. At least soon there’ll be less of this –
– and more space, light and silence!
I’ll probably still miss the coloured glass.
That’s our back door at the moment.
This one’s the side window in the toilet.
There’ll be more beauties to capture when we settle. We went to have a quick look around the yard in the new place the other day. There’s a lot of mint in the garden, and a largish chilli bush. Also what looks like a spear of asparagus!
Well, looks like we’re moving next weekend! 😀 We’re off up the road to One Mile – it’s the house I really liked when we walked through it, and there seems to be a lot of space. So, we’re nearly out the door here.
It’s funny – Tuesday we were on tenterhooks, wondering if our offer for another house would go through. I had forgotten about this one! In the space of a few hours we found we’d lost the other house, but the agents for that one put us forward for yet another place, and were happy to take our application before it was put up online. And then, we got the phone call to say our application for the One Mile place went through 😆
I still have bits and pieces to pack (the teacups!) but I’m thankful that I started the books a while back. The heavier things are done, and we’re thinking this move should be a bit easier than the last one. Our stuff hasn’t had a chance to pile up in random places yet, and cleaning should go well. Some nights I don’t sleep well, so there’s a wave of tiredness that swamps me sometimes, and confuses even simple actions. As an example – I wear different glasses for everyday and for the laptop. This afternoon I knew I had to change glasses so I could go downstairs to get a cup of tea. Put them on, puzzled as to why my eyes were even blurrier. Realised I was trying to put my everyday glasses on over the top of my reading glasses… Obviously, I really needed that tea.
The title of this post is the title of a song I hadn’t heard for a long time, but rediscovered yesterday. Seemed to fit, but I could only find an audio clip for it. Since I’ve done so well with packing today I decided to rest and enjoy some time online tonight. In the absence of an official video for the titular song, here’s another clip to make you smile!
Powering my way through packing at the moment (you know, with rest and coffee breaks included…) I feel like the hardest bits are pretty much done. I have to remember how I packed my teacups safely last time, but I’ve finished the fragile things from the glass display cases. Books are all packed.
Still got most of the art room to go. The TV room has been my main point of packing so far. This means it has been a mess, even though most of it now is actually boxed or in some other kind of order.
Still life with cardboard 😀 Time to put my feet up…
We’re waiting to hear back about a couple of houses. It’s all quite exciting! My Babe is still getting his business off the ground, so there are various things to do with that, in between the house viewings and box packing. He’s waiting for a website to be finished, but in the meantime, there’s his YouTube channel. Go and listen to some podcasts about songwriting, or relax with some music.
I’ve managed to pack a fair amount of boxes in the last few days. Mostly books, a few trinkets… books are easier – they’re mostly some form of rectangle, so they can fit in any type of box. When I finish for the day, I like to just watch stuff, settle down a bit for the evening. Lately I’ve been catching up on a bit of CSI. I don’t really like horror, or even actiony/thriller type things, but I love a bit of forensics 🙂 The only thing is, I’m watching the earliest seasons. One of the fun things is catching the supposed corpses breathing, or showing other signs of life. Some are quite obviously breathing, and I’ve caught a few eye twitches. I can only suppose that later seasons will refine the non-breathing technique!
When you think about it, all TV shows are artificial. They’re all actors acting – making us believe that what we see is what is there. We get so caught up in the story that it’s a bit jarring to see a corpse breathe. It snaps us out of the narrative, and can make the scene seem absurd.
Life’s a bit like that. We’re wandering (galloping?) along, thinking what we see is real, and then the corpse breathes, and we’re looking from outside at absurdity. Where we are now (as in moving again) has been a bit of a snap back to reality, where our plans can sometimes veer off at the last minute. Good thing there’s stillbreathing!
Still, I can appreciate a bit of absurdity. The boys have shown me a few AI song mashups, and YouTube has given me a few to watch… I’m not sure if you’ve ever wanted to hear Johnny Cash “sing” Barbie Girl? Here it is anyway…
I listened to that one, and YouTube seemed to think I would also enjoy this –
They were right.
Well, I’m off to check out some forensics. It’ll probably be more comprehensible than the clips above.
There are random boxes everywhere at the moment, but my clay sculpture (John) continues to look cool and ready for anything 🙂
Passed the house inspection today. We’ve also been given info on what needs to be cleaned to get our bond back – at least we don’t need to pay a bond cleaner. We’ve been turned down for one place, and are looking at another next week. It would be tempting to get a little panicky now.
My Babe sent me this to listen to, so now I’m sharing it with you 🙂
All things considered, it seems we’re right where we should be…
YouTube also threw this onto my suggestions page – not sure why, as I don’t think I’ve ever heard of the One Voice Children’s Choir before. I love hearing children singing out, using their voices – the stated aim of the choir is to “to inspire the world through the power of children’s voices”. The song gives something to think about.
Started packing a few things today. Feels a bit weird – I could probably look back in this blog some months ago and see the same words – but it’s time to start again. We have some questions as to why we have to move on…this place feels right to me, and we haven’t had enough time to recover financially from the last move, but I’m starting to feel a little excited about what might come next. We applied for a place today, although we haven’t yet seen it. The race for rentals right now is such that the agents want everyone to apply first so they can weed out those who aren’t eligible before the house is shown. We’re looking at a substantial rise in rent with every place we’re looking at (we have another viewing in two week’s time) but we should still be able to cover it. All the places we’ve asked about will have space for my Babe to set up his studio, and they’re close enough to public transport for the rest of us to get around. I want to get good use out of the verandah here before I go, and I will miss the coloured glass all around!
These are our inside windows, at night when the hall light is on 🙂
Moving here has been good for my health, but I’ve been wondering whether spending long periods in strange light might be affecting my eyes. It will be nice to get back to good natural light. Speaking of health…I ran out of one of my painkillers the other day, and hadn’t had a chance to get to the chemist. I’d been feeling not too bad, so thought it would be OK to skip a day while I had to wait to get the prescription filled. Every so often I make the wrong choice. I made it half a day (ish) before I was reminded why I take them 😆 I was also reminded that interruption of meds can mean a few days to get back on an even keel… Anyway, we had to take Biggest Boy to an appointment, and there was a chemist near there. There was also a charity shop, and I found this little cheerful being.
😀 I’ve no idea what it’s for. It’s tiny, but there’s room for a tealight, so that’s what I’ll use it for. I went to the Salvos across the road here this arvo, feeling a bit down about all the stuff still to do, and came across this little piece of encouragement.
Nice to know! ❤
Well, it’s on to new horizons for us. If anyone wants to come round here for a cuppa, you’re very welcome, but you’ll need get here soon!
Last year, I wrote about saying goodbye to some of the musical icons of my childhood.
Today, we say goodbye to Sinéad O’Connor. I, along with many others, probably first heard her singing this –
It was, and still is, a great introduction to her. (but if that’s the only song you’ve heard, listen to a few more!)
When I wrote about the icons we lost last year, it was with sadness and nostalgia – they were all considerably older than me, and seemed to me to have been around forever. This is different. I knew, at the time, that she was quite young in the above song. Somehow I never consciously put that together with her being only a couple of years older than me. It’s a sobering thought.
She was fierce. And fragile. Famous. And sometimes seen as infamous (although, I think, unfairly vilified). Often seemed to speak without thinking. But more often speaking (and singing) of things about which she thought deeply. Flawed. Passionate. Authentic.
Thank you, Sinéad – for baring your soul, and for raising your beautiful voice.
When we first moved into this house, we were told by someone we came across that they had been in consultation with the owner, that they were going to buy the house and that we would only have the six month lease here. The real estate agents that handled the rental seemed to know nothing about it, there was no paperwork, and we heard nothing more about it. It still felt hard to settle in and make ourselves at home, but at some point we decided to enjoy whatever time we had, however things turned out. The six months is coming up, but we were told earlier this week that we could sign a new lease – great celebrations! – and we thought we’d take a chance and ask for one year rather than a further six months.
Got a phone call today. Seems the owner is giving the house to the other people. It appears to have been a shock to the agents – they’re not open on Saturdays, but they got the notification today and rang us straight away. We’ll find out Monday what the details are.
I think we don’t really know how to feel right now. I don’t want to move back into some sort of colourless box, where there’s no room to move.
Colour (and space for books…) is important!
I really, really, don’t want to pack everything up again. Eventually, we’ll be able to look ahead to the thought of finding somewhere better, somewhere more settled. Later, sometime…
I love this place. I don’t want to say goodbye. We’ll have two months from Monday to sort everything out (that’s past the end date of the lease, but they have to give two months notice to leave), and it feels like too much of a rush. Strangely, I also feel like working on some of the things I was putting off until we knew we were secure here – to use this time well in the spaces left. Anyone know of any 4+ bedroom ramblers around? We don’t mind quirky layouts and architecture (although we don’t want decrepit!) – it’s the space we’d like. A reasonable rent would be good as well 🙂
Next week we’ll draw another breath, survey the situation, and look for where the light is coming from.
a bit of creativity, a bit of eco consciousness, a bit of inspiration.... hopefully not a lot of pompousness and blathering :D
i'm not entirely sure what's going on here... let's travel along and see...
