We are mid-move and already completely exhausted, stumbling between optimism and enthusiasm to despair and frustration. We have just a few days left to vacate our lovely old house, construct a kitchen, bathroom and two bedrooms in the vineyard shed and move in - all within our strict budget of zip! To keep myself motivated, I have taken to watching episodes of Grand Designs on Youtube in the evenings, favouring those featuring unemployed vegans with impossible builds in foreign lands on miniscule budgets.
We plan to move in physically on Saturday, but managed to move a significant amount of furniture and boxes today - in 40 degree C heat! To top it off, we realised the vineyard water tanks are full of sludge just as the pump blew up up leaving us with no water OR sludge...and something smells very nasty in the bathroom drain....
The To Do list now includes:
- plumber in on Friday to fix pump and septic system
- install second had kitchen including stove and rangehood
- electrician on Friday to install rangehood and kitchen power points
- finish painting new wall separating bedrooms (what was one large open plan room upstairs has been turned into two bedrooms... the children will just have to share for a while...)
- finish bathroom floor
- destroy population of red back spiders living in the bathroom
- clean house - carpet cleaners booked for Monday morning. Struggling with moral inclination to clean carpets professionally for a few hundred dollars and tight-arse inclination to spot clean them myself because most people don't bother to have them professionally cleaned...but will begrudgingly take moral high ground just because it's the right thing to do grumble grumble...)
- tidy lawns and gardens of house
- secretly dispose of bags and boxes of crap that Jamie refuses to throw out
- disconnect/transfer internet, telephone, power, gas,
- Buy beer and sausages to feed the gang of great friends who have offered to help on Saturday
- and something else very important I have forgotten....
