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.

I am writing this from my new bed in my new house. Downstairs is a partially unpacked living room, a not-at-all unpacked study and a mostly done kitchen. I am pleasantly, satisfyingly tired, and not feeling stressed out about the house or the things in it. Moving Day has, in short, been a Big Success.

And a significant part of this can be attributed to one thing: the fact we hired a removals company. Not a man with a van, not some friends who offered to help, a professional removals company.

They weren’t cheap, mind, though thankfully they weren’t one of the companies that wanted to charge us over a thousand pounds to move our stuff less than two miles down the road. (We get the impression that the companies who quoted us particularly stupid prices simply didn’t want to do the job — fair enough, since it involved lugging a shit-ton of stuff down from a second-floor flat, but it would have perhaps been nice if they’d just said that rather than arguably attempting to take advantage of us.)

But no, the company we used — Robinsons, if you’re curious — were great. They showed up promptly at the agreed time with a big truck that was more than capable of fitting all our stuff in — I’ve proven on more than one occasion that I have too much stuff for a Transit van by myself, let alone with Andie’s stuff in there too — and then proceeded to lug everything down the stairs for us while we alternated between twiddling our thumbs, making cups of tea for them and playing games on our phones, the only entertainment devices that were still within easy reach.

Then they drove the truck to our new place, unloaded everything and were gone before 4pm. If we’d been doing this ourselves, we’d still be shifting things well into the night, probably taking multiple trips and getting increasingly irritable.

But nope; the additional expense was well worth it for the peace of mind and lack of stress it brought. Tomorrow we can wake up refreshed and tackle the rooms that still need working on. We can buy and fit a dishwasher. And then we can flop down on the sofa — the sofa which wouldn’t fit up the stairs to our previous flat and which we consequently haven’t had the chance to sit on for a year and a half — to watch some television, safe in the knowledge that holy shit, this house actually belongs to us. Pretty neat, no?

Now it may be a ridiculously lame hour but I’m off to get some sleep. Photos will undoubtedly follow at some point in the near future once the place is a little more presentable!

So, this time tomorrow we should be officially moved in to our new house. We almost certainly won’t have everything unpacked by then — though I guess you never know! — but we will be in there. Which will be nice.

This all seems to have rolled around rather quickly and surprisingly smoothly. You hear all sorts of horror stories about people buying houses (particularly their first house) that are full of stupid words like “gazumping” and this has just been… well, pretty straightforward, really, and we haven’t had to do nearly as much faffing around as I thought we’d have to. It was pretty much a case of going in to the estate agents, saying “we want to buy this house”, answering a few questions and then, a couple of months later, taking possession of our new house.

That’s an oversimplification, of course, though not by much; the people we were buying the place from didn’t dick around, and even the lawyers didn’t seem to spend too much time arguing with one another, though there was a little of that. The process was so smooth and straightforward that the act of handing over a not-insignificant amount of money for the deposit felt no more “serious” than just paying a bill or something. And now here we are; one sleep away from moving in.

While I was working last week, Andie and her mother spent a lot of time doing the new place up — painting, hanging curtains, cleaning, that sort of thing. I helped with a bit of the painting, but I stayed out of the way for most of it largely because I was busy, but also because I don’t trust myself an inch with DIY. As a homeowner I’m supposed to start caring about this stuff now, I think, but I’ve never been particularly fussy about what colour my walls are or if they match the ceiling; generally speaking, so long as I have walls around me and a roof that doesn’t leak above me, I’m fine. (Oh, and it should preferably be a comfortable temperature, too; warm when it’s cold outside, cool when it’s hot outside.)

I’m interested to see what it will look like with our stuff in it. It’s been a little hard to picture so far, but I’m sure it’s going to look good. I’m looking forward to having my own downstairs study for working — though with my current employment situation, it remains to be seen how much use it will be getting on a professional basis — and having an actual spare bedroom. We have a brand new bed, too, which I’m hoping is going to be significantly more comfortable than our current one.

There are still acquisitions to make before it will feel “finished” — though I’m aware once you own a house it’s never truly “finished”. We need a big-ass dining table for our extension out the back — big enough to fit sprawling board games, specifically — and we’re getting a dishwasher and tumble dryer, too. The dishwasher in particular is something I’m looking forward to; there are few chores I hate more than washing up. I’m not sure why, but my mind has always somehow equated dirty plates with being utterly disgusting — even if you’ve only just finished eating off them — and thus sticking my hands into a bowl of water with them has never been especially appealing. If you can get a magic box to wash them for you, then great; having our own place gives us the freedom to do just that which you just don’t get in most rental properties.

Oh, and we’re probably going to get a dog, too. We both quite wanted a cat, but we feel that would probably be foolish while we still have the rats Clover and Socks. Neither of them are big fans of coming out of the cage — except to climb up it and get into their Lego house that we usually put on top of it — so it probably wouldn’t be a problem, but I still feel it’s probably best not to risk having them in the house with an animal that might want to eat them. A dog, I feel, is less likely to want to munch on them — plus it’s a good excuse to go out and about and get some exercise by giving it walks every day.

Anyway, this is all hypothetical for now, but it’s not long until it becomes reality. Pretty exciting — though to be perfectly honest I’m looking forward to the “exciting” bit being over and just being able to get down to some serious and much-needed relaxation.