Goodbyes

After a mammoth moving session at the weekend, we are out of our house and ready for a new start. Mum, Dad, my sister and R’s dad helped us pack our lives into (a shameful amount of) boxes and transport them to the new house. We hired probably the worst removal company in London to move our furniture. They turned up late, arrived in a filthy van and demanded that we provide them with a broom to clean it out and were generally rude and unhelpful. The also arbitrarily decided that certain bits of furniture they didn’t fancy moving “weren’t included in the quote”. Turns out, you get what you pay for (they were cheap). I ended up having a heated argument with them (which I lost). We were very happy to see the back of them! In case you’re wondering, they were UK Easy Removals – don’t use them!

Our new house is now packed to the rafters with all our stuff and we have moved in with R’s dad in North London for the next couple of months while we get our house ship shape (by which I mean habitable). And just in case we didn’t have enough on our plates, I am also starting a new job next week (eek!) so it will be good to have some stability for the next few weeks while I’m settling in. I’m anticipating it is going to be quite all-consuming to begin with!

It was very sad saying goodbye to our lovely little house where we have been so happy for the last few years. We remembered all the special times we had had there – our engagement party, my hen party, our first few nights as a married couple, countless dinner parties and birthdays and paddling pool parties. As a little homage to our house, here are some photos of it over the last couple of years.

And we mustn't forget our scruffy patch of garden that we cleared and dug and hoed and planted to our hearts' content. And where we made our first foray into vegetable growing (with fairly limited results) and where we idled away many a sunny afternoon. 

We had to say goodbye to our sometime-cat too. He has moved with our next door neighbour to West London where apparently he is settling in well. I bet he misses the mean streets of South-East London though, and all his little local kitty friends. Here are some of his best moments!

Luckily it’s not goodbye forever to our house – we will be able to visit! By coincidence two of our friends who currently live in Telegraph Hill needed a new place and we offered them our house, which they gladly accepted! So they will be moving in in the next week, and we will be able to come back and see our house and say hello once in a while. I’m so glad that they are moving in just as the bulbs that we planted are coming up in the garden, little sunny pops of yellow daffs and pink tulips, poking their heads tentatively out of the earth. I hope they enjoy our house and garden as much as we have.

I loved looking back at these pictures. We really are so excited to be moving on, and about the prospect of having our own place at last, but we will definitely be leaving a tiny weeny piece of our hearts in this little corner of London.

p.s. happy pancake day! We are postponing ours to tomorrow as we got home too late to make them:)