Co-Habiting

Wow.  Just... Wow.  You may have heard, in the dim distant past that is the end of 2010, Kellie and myself decided that moving in together was a really really great plan.  Easy Peasy, we thought.

That thought line right there was probably the beginning of the end.  If ever you are planning something, never, under ANY circumstance, use the phrase "How hard can it be" or "That'll be a doddle!" because, 99.9% of the time, that means it will be a mission.

We decided that moving in would only take a few weeks, we'd be done and dusted before Xmas, we'd be sorted and so on (more curses), when, in fact, it is only NOW, two months later, that Kellie is actually IN.  It all started so well, so easily...

(this is where there would be movie dream-sequence wiggly lines on the screen)

We started packing up and throwing stuff out of both houses literally mid-November.  Clear out as much shite as you can, pack stuff up, off, up and away you go.  The kids rooms at Kellies were easy.  Shit out, good stuff packed, leave out enough clothes for a couple of weeks and wash it in cycles so there is always clean clothes.

Then came kitchens, and main bedrooms, and in Kellies case, a loft, in my case, the bits I've saved "just in case" and so on.  Through out December, we were moving things across from Canvey to Basildon, and hired a van (expertly driven by Pete, thank you Mr Pete!) to get the big stuff over.  We spent hours packing, dismantling, moving, preparing...

When the first van load was unpacked, my rather spacious house suddenly seemed a little more... Loaded.  So, you can imagine what the second van load did.  The third was kind of like overkill.  Were there still a leak in the Gulf of Mexico, I would have been able to block it in an instant.

My kitchen didn't have floor space per se, more of a single line of space between the microwave and the doorway.  The lounge had a sofa and armchairs, but they were buried under bags and boxes and was pretty much a No Mans (or Womans) Land.  The hallway & landing was single file skinny people only.  The bedrooms had beds and boxes.  The bathroom had boxes, and toilet had stuff, the front garden, and the back garden also had stuff.

Clearly, we had not been ruthless enough. 

That was Sunday.  Monday, conveniently, Kellie went to work and kids went to school.  So I sat in the kitchen and started offloading, and dumping, and clearing and going through stuff I'd already gone through.  Need, Need, Don't Need, Why, Don't Need... After six hours, the kitchen was clear.  So I cleared the living room next, then collapsed and died on the sofa. 

Avenge me.

That night, when Kellie resurrected my broken corpse after work, she sorted out Mollys room while I cleared room for the boys to get into their rooms.  Tams room, being bigger, ended up with a few boxes so they were out of the way.  I even found the bathroom.

And that has been the story since.  Clear an area, move on.  We ended up hiring a skip for a week, and after Kellie flashed fluttered her eyebrows at the nice man, he let us keep it over Xmas and into New Year because we had both contracted Ebola and couldn't do much unpacking.  Not only did he let us keep it, he let us keep it free of charge.  Result.

So, January and a new year rolled around, and we have been busy.  Kellie between work and being fired, me between playing housewife and being injured, not to mention a horde of kids running around settling down and getting used to new routines.  Yes, we still have boxes to unpack, yes we still have to rummage in them if we need something specific, and yes, the chaos is getting to us both.  We've decided to swap Tam and the boys bedrooms around as her is bigger and the boys need more space.  Once that is done, then we can unpack the boys stuff and get the bedrooms finished.  Then it's finish the last couple of boxes in the living room, then our room, and voila!

The moral of this story - if something seems easy, don't SAY it'll be easy.  You will regret it.

And PS - that picture isn't me and Kellie, she loves me regardless ;)