Saturday, September 22, 2007

Counting socks!

Things are now progressing.
We have had a skip (and eventually, after much nagging, persuaded the company to collect it again). We were very good and did not fill it above the mark, and wonder of wonders none of the neighbours put anything in or took anything out.
We have a firm quotation from a removal company. The challenge now is that they have sent us a questionnaire to complete for insurance purposes listing everying they are moving, down to the numbers of pairs of socks and underwear. We have asked for an extension of time as we are still counting!
The partition in the garage is nearly complete. This could not really be worked on until the skip was removed and we could get out of the garage some secondary glazing which we were given by a neighbour about a decade ago and which we have now in turn given to another neighbour. And we cannot fit the last piece of plasterboard until we have replaced the garage door lock - which is on order.
Painting inside is complete except for touching up damaged paintwork after most things have been moved out. Painting outside is continuing, though working up a ladder is not Jonathan's favourite activity.
And of course we have started trying to sort out the garden. It has always been low maintenance, in the sense that we have not done much, but we are trying to make it as easy as possibly for tenants to keep tidy. The soil is very heavy and there is orange clay only a few inches down, where there are not rockery stones and tree roots. It is rife with ground elder and ground ivy, both of which are being removed steadily. We were very grateful to Rachel Caiger who spent a whole day here working in the garden, and made a great deal of difference.
Meanwhile we keep filling boxes with possessions, either to store or to take, and have some long deliberations about into which category to put things - or even whether we really need to keep them at all.
Eventually. someone collected the parquet flooring from the hall after we offered it on Freecycle. Let's hope they enjoy jigsaws as seven square metres of flooring is a lot of pieces of wood. Some other things have also been disposed on via Freecycle, but not everything we offered. We are still awaiting collection of the sofa this weekend. We initially tried the St Albans site, but have found the Luton site much more successful, probably because of all the students in Luton.
No pictures this time. Perhaps we will show the garden next time, once it is looking better than at any time since we moved in.

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