I have not been reporting progress for a while, it has just been TOO busy. So this blog is a two-week summary of the trials and tribulations of moving a possession-laden life into a not-quite complete new house. Inevitably, not everything has gone exactly to plan, and various new problems have emerged as we have tried to settle in.
On Wednesday September 10th the first move took place. This was to transfer the totality of what had been stored in the basement of the rental house to the new house. All the still-wrapped furniture and rugs, packing boxes and other “not been used in the rental house” items were moved to the new home. We had also packed up a dozen boxes of things we could do without for a couple of weeks (like lots of clothes and papers) to get these transferred at the same time. The run-up to the actual move date was fairly frenzied and the more enjoyable things in life (like going out and seeing friends) got put on the back burner. The movers came and spent half a day doing the transfer. Since there was still work being done on the house, virtually everything went down into the lower floor. All the boxes went into the two unfinished storage rooms. We had to keep the house as clear as possible for the various tradesmen who had not yet finished their tasks in spite of the very clear deadlines we had laid down.
It was rather a horrifying sight once they had left. The two storage rooms were stacked with boxes, rugs and furniture piled seven and eight feet high.
The next week sped past in a blur. We had to get everything packed up in the rental house (gradually removing from service things that we could do without for a few days, and also doing some unpacking in the new home (to liberate packing boxes for the second phase of moving). During this intermediate week, we were driving back and forth between the two houses regularly, moving a few of our fragile and cherished pieces ourselves and taking delivery of new items like our new kingsize bed.
There was also lots of chasing builders – we had to do this directly as Bill the Builder had gone off for a short holiday. He was getting totally stressed out – three house which he had started building at different times all suddenly reached the frenzy of finishing simultaneously. Getting his attention was sometimes a challenge. From Thursday, the builders were more or less banished as we had promised a couple of days clear run well in advance to the wallpaper hanger, and we were determined to stick by that. In the end, she took a little longer than we or she had expected, but all was completed in time. However, a particular issue was the inexplicable failure of the second security/data wiring specialist to give us a quote. He came with Jonathan (the electrician) two weeks previously, looked over everything, said that it would be no problem to do everything in time for our move – and then disappeared without trace. We contacted Jonathan in despair. He no longer no longer had a license for data wiring, but he had had plenty of experience was happy to do it. As good as his word, he came early one morning and connected it all up ready for cable TV, telephone and broadband. The security system stuff will just have to wait!
Wednesday September 17th was moving day for humans and all the remaining stuff in the rental house. Another early start for us, and the moving crew turned up promptly too. We deliberately left some things (like all the pictures on the wall) behind at the rental house to avoid risk of damage. Loading up the rental house was done rapidly (due in part to the exhausting efforts of boxing up all our possessions in advance). At the house, the movers had a big job to do first – all the furniture and some of the larger rugs had to be moved out of the basement storage to their final destinations. Once that had been done, they started unloading the rental house stuff, and finally finished their labours by early afternoon. Then we were left to ourselves, surrounded by a mountain of boxes and furniture. Any sense of satisfaction that we had achieved our great goal was overwhelmed by the scale of the sorting task ahead. Following much repeated good advice, the first job was to make up the bed, so that we had somewhere to retreat to when exhaustion set in. Once that was done, we just piled in to make one room habitable, and then admitted defeat.
There was little chance of cooking a meal in the new house. Not all of the appliances ordered two months ago have arrived before moving day. No dishwasher, no oven, no cook top – Bosch have run into serious delivery delays. Never mind, we will survive -we have a microwave, we have a crockpot, we have the coffee maker and we have the Big Green Egg. It may make for a rather restricted diet for a couple of weeks, but we won’t let that get us down. But cooking with that limited range on moving day was too much to contemplate. So we went into town to find dinner at the Back Porch restaurant. A quick eat meal, was followed by a return to more unpacking and an early night.
The next couple of days followed a familiar pattern. Up early to open the house for whichever workmen were coming that day. Unpacking and sorting. Leaping up and down and making threatening noises at Bill the builder over the disasters of the previous day (I got a little heated at the prospect of cold showers on Thursday morning as the plumbing was not behaving, as an example). Unpacking and sorting, and trying to lead a normalish life amidst the efforts. Collapse exhausted at the start of the evening prior to an imaginatively cooked dinner. Bed and round the same loop the next day.
Living in a not-quite-complete house has had a few benefits – we still owe the builder and tradesmen for the last part of the build, so they have a certain incentive to get things sorted out. Living here ensures that we are finding out what needs doing before it becomes less easy to push to get them fixed. To give examples of the things we have run into:
- Very limited cooking facilities because of Bosch delivery delays. They had a very attractive promotion if you bought three appliances at the same time, so we ordered things two months ago. It seems that half of America took advantage of this – and all stocks disappeared suddenly.
- Electric light switch confusion – so many switches, we can’t remember what each one does. We are planning to stick little labels on all the switches.
- Strange goings on in the wiring have been happening. We were sitting in the main room and suddenly, without any action on our part, the main ceiling lights all suddenly came on. At other times, turning on light on caused another light to intermittently flicker on and off. Starting a ceiling fan caused other circuits to trip out. Like us, Jonathan was alarmed by this, and he spent a lot of time with the switchboard. The solution was found. He had installed new high tech circuit breakers (as required by the latest electrical safety standards). However, the new trip switches are too sensitive, and electricians are apparently reporting similar problems far and wide in new builds. The slightest thing can cause one switch to interact with its neighbor in the circuit box and create strange effects. It seems that Siemens have not got the design of these new switches properly sorted, in spite of them being the government approved items. So we are being migrated back to more reliable less high-tech trip switches, and the problems have abated.
- No data or telephony wiring in the house has been resolved, hurrah!
- Nasty smells in one bathroom was tracked back to the U-bend not being full of water. Running the taps and showers for a bit resolved that problem.
- Worries over water quality persisted. Our water comes out a well in the ground, no chemical treatment plant involved. But before we could consider drinking it, we did need to get it tested for purity, bacteria, mineral content and the like. Samples were sent off for assay, but everything got delayed. However, on Friday, we received the results – super pure water, suitable for drinking. Another positive tick!
- Cold water was finally found not to be due to faulty water heaters or plumbing. It was all due to a control switch, apparently a very rare problem. Rare or not, it has been fixed.
- The mountain of packing paper and cardboard boxes was upsetting to the European recycling-oriented mindset. There is not a lot of enthusiasm for recycling round here, and a lot of stuff was headed for the dump. We eventually found a recycling centre about 10 miles away where we could take paper and cardboard (though not the plasticized protective covering used by the movers), so our consciences is a little assuaged.
So, exhausted but increasingly happy and sorted, we look forward to the first full week of life in our new home. Maybe we will even get a little free time to get out and see what is going on in the world.