1586: pkunzip -d house.zip

The unpacking is done! I think. Unless there’s a secret box hiding somewhere, just waiting to taunt me with its meaningless contents. If there is a secret box hiding somewhere, just waiting to taunt me with its meaningless contents, my response to it right now would almost certainly be to simply empty its meaningless contents straight into the bin. The house is full; there’s no more room for crap.

That’s not entirely true, of course — though I’ve had to find some creative storage solutions in my study — but this place most certainly now looks “lived in”, in a good way. We have Things on Shelves in a vaguely organised fashion — the shelves in the living room are the best example of this, while the rickety bookcase in my study shouldn’t be examined too closely lest one of the two loose shelves come crashing down, bringing a ton of heavy books with them — and there are places to sit. (We have two sofas in our living room, but that’s largely because we had to buy a second one in the previous place because our nice leather sofabed wouldn’t go up the damn stairs. Here, meanwhile, it came through the door without a single issue — and thankfully without any damage from having been kept in the garage for a year and a half.)

We even have a spare bedroom, which is a first for me. (Second bedrooms in places I’ve lived have tended to end up converted to office/study space — here, we not only have a spare bedroom, but a study each.) Said spare bedroom had a bit of a paint accident earlier, leading to an ugly bare patch in the middle of the wall, but that was the one room we haven’t yet redecorated anyway. I guess now there’s an incentive to get it done, huh?

The area that probably needs the most work at present is the dining room, which is in the small extension on the back of the house. Right now, we have a half-full shelf of board games — the other half of the board games are proudly displayed in the living room — and some display cabinets that Andie is yet to put her ample Lego collection in. Sitting in the centre of the room and looking rather lonely is the dining table and chairs I inherited from my former housemate Claire; the chairs are old and faded and the table is far too small for the space it occupies. At the very least, the table will be replaced with something much bigger at some point: the aim is for the dining room to become a suitable space for playing sprawling board games in. The room is certainly big enough; we just need a nice flat surface to put all those bits of card, wood and plastic on.

Anyway. I’m aware I’m becoming a house bore. This is probably the last “yay house” post for a while yet, since most of the major things — unpacking, mainly — are done. There’s a minor bit of decorating to do here and there still, and I’m sure we’ll find some “projects” we want to work on in the near future. But what was an empty, slightly grubby house a few days ago is now very much a place where we live.

And Andie and I have both agreed that we are not moving again, ever.

Uh-huh. Sure.