Well our house-shift is almost complete. We just need to finish off cleaning up the old house, and unpack a few final boxes, and it will be totally done. Waiting for the phone and internet to be flicked over to the new place is a bit of a pain in the ass too – come on Vodafone if you’re going to charge me $150 for the privilege of moving house you should at least get your ass into gear and not force me to wait days upon days upon days for someone to simply unplug one cord and plug it in somewhere else.
In any case, moving has been its usual mission. It started off last week with us starting to box things up. However, there were pretty big limits as to what could actually be boxed up – due to us having to continue living in the house in the meanwhile. Also, sorting out whose stuff was whose was a rather long process, and also meant that actually getting things packed up and ready to go was harder than what I’d probably anticipated. On Thursday night, last week, we got the keys and started shifting boxes to the new place. A few smallish pieces of furniture also got moved, but we couldn’t really start on the big stuff quite yet – until we had made the decision that “yes, we are actually shifting today”. That day was Saturday, which turned into a rather marathon length day of carrying heavy furniture out of the old place, into a trailer or the back of a car – then driving what felt like the longest 7km trip across Auckland ever – before unloading and heading back. Setting up the new house has involved numerous re-shifting of furniture: especially in the lounge where I think we’re up to the third or fourth variation on how all the furniture will be organised.
Since then there has been more unpacking, more trips back to the old house to clean it up (which will hopefully be concluded tonight) and ever more reorganisations at the new place. We have to keep the cats in for a few weeks so they don’t try to run back to the old place, which is a bit stressful having to work out where they are every time you open a door, but I guess that’s life. It is nice to be so close to the city, and to be able to just pop up the road to a really good selection of shops (on Jervois Road). The driving to the Shore to pick up Amalia is probably about 7 minutes quicker in each direction, which will add up, though probably my biggest annoyance is that I now have to drive to work each day (at least when I’m not working in town).
One of the strangest aspects of the whole “moving” process is when we’re back at the old place. It feels so familiar and still very much like ‘home’ to me. I guess we were there for almost two years, so it’s not surprising that it would feel so homely. Having it empty, and knowing that you’re moving on, actually feels quite sad – like you’re leaving a good friend behind, knowing for a fact that you will soon never see them again. Leila put it quite aptly, when she said that “it feels like you’ve broken up with your partner and are coming to the realisation of how much you did love them and how much you took them for granted”. I’m sure that over time the new place will start to feel like home, but at the moment I certainly do find myself already missing our old house and realising what an awesome place it was.
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