I am now the proud owner of a significantly bigger house and a significantly bigger mortgage. Well, I’m only proud of the first one, I guess. Within 24 hours of touching down on NZ soil we had moved all of our earthly belongings approximately 3km up the road. It’s fair to say, we like the neighbourhood.
We completely packed the house up before we went to Tahiti, so it was ready to go. We got movers in to do the furniture and heavy stuff. They arrived first thing on Sunday morning, 10 minutes before the thunder and hail storm started. Great. I was fine – it was my job to stand at the door and tell them which room to put things in. I could feel their resentment every time they came through the door.
The rain made everything slippery. Things got pretty dodgy at one stage when they were carrying a filing cabinet up the steps. The guy slipped on the top step and both he and the filing cabinet ended up at the bottom. He smacked his tail bone on the tiles on the way down. It wasn’t pretty. The cabinet was fine once we wiped the mud off. I suspect he won’t be fine for quite some time.
The only other thing that went wrong was that the fridge got damaged. I was pretty gutted about that. Somehow it got dropped on a doorhandle. Huh? Anyhow, things seemed to be sorted when the driver suggested that we retrospectively pay an insurance premium and make a claim. Sweet. Unfortunately his boss didn’t seem to think that was quite so cool.
So all in all things went well and I’m on top of the world. The new house ROCKS. We have tonnes more storage than before. We also have approximpately 250 new coat hangers. It would seem that the last owners collected them in the exceptionally large walk in wardrobe and decided to leave them for us. Great.
I spent quite some time this morning distributing them around the neighbourhood rubbish bins. A guy over the road seemed to take exception. I asked him why, considering the bins were going to be collected in an hour and were already out on the road side. That implied to me that the owners had filled them as much as they were going to. He didn’t seem to have much of an answer to that, so I left him to it, but I still walked up someone else’s driveway and pretended to live there, just in case. I don’t want angry neighbours before we even get our outdoor speakers hooked up.
So tonight the rest of the family comes home from the cat hotel. Then I guess it’s life as usual.
I wonder how many times I’ll drive past our new motorway off-ramp on my way home from work.
Blog of The Hawk 
Just tell your anti coathanger neighbour about your penchant for nude housekeeping and I’m sure you can put anything you like where you like 😉
Good luck in your new home.
YAY I’m so glad things went well and you love your new place. 🙂 That’s so exciting.
We’re only 1 week behind you – we’ll be moving this Friday! Hopefully it will go just as smoothe!
Joy
Mike – I might have to do that. I suspect we may be getting a bad rep already. Yesterday Shaun was hanging our outdoor speakers up and the neighbour spotted him. She went away and came back a few minutes later with another neighbour. Hmmm.
Joy – Thanks chick. Good luck to you. Organisation and patience… you’ll be fine.
It might be an idea and do the rounds of the neighbours to let them see first hand you are normal people (relatively at least 😉 ). We all know that first impressions stick even if they are wildly wrong. They are probably seeing those speakers and envisioning long noisy parties. Hell even being forced to listen to your neighbours music while you are inside your own house can be an issue so they are probably worried about that too.
Set them at ease quickly. You know how gossip can spead 🙂
You are way too sensible Mike! I was thinking more along the lines of easing them in slowly by keeping my clothes on for our housewarming party on Saturday.