On The Move … But Not Traveling

We’ve moved! But I can’t think of anything less like traveling than packing up all our household items and transporting them two kilometres down the road.

In some ways, this has been the easiest move I’ve ever done. Darling Man has not let me lift anything at all. He and our helper did the bulk of the packing and Darling Man and a hired truck driver did all the heavy lifting.

It should have been an easy move because we (technically) don’t have much stuff. We’ve bought a bed for Miss M, a desk each for Darling Man and myself and some kitchen goods. But it took three loads in the hired truck to move three pieces of furniture, our clothes, shoes, books and Darling Man’s potted plants.

I suspect it was the “roll and stuff” method of packing adopted by Darling Man and our helper that made the move so arduous.

Unpacking is a total nightmare. I can’t find anything. And we’ve been so busy with our street food tours these last few weeks that it’s like we’re marinating in mess. It is not a good feeling.

And when I say I can’t find anything, I mean it. It’s taken me two weeks to find Miss M’s underpants. They ended up in a plastic shopping bag stuffed into a kitchen cupboard and until I found the bag she only had three pairs. I can’t find my card reader, so my photos remain stuck in the camera. (The photos in this post are all from my new smartphone.)

Our new house is smaller than our old house. My grand plan of making our old house pay for itself by renting out a room on AirBnB didn’t work out. And while we had some lovely AirBnB guests and some fabulous house guests, the extra expense of having such a big house just didn’t seem worthwhile now I’m going to to to Australia for three months to have another baby.

We are now living at the end of a dead-end street, surrounded by empty blocks of land. I suspect Darling Man has grand plans to turn this vacant lot …

into something that looks like this, which is down the road a bit from our place …

We now have three big bedrooms instead of four, and four bathrooms instead of five. We no longer have a back garden but we do have lots of vacant blocks of land for the dogs to explore. (We still have three puppies left, although by the end of next week we’ll only have one.)

All this downsizing is going to save us US$400 a month, which is great. But we lost the bond on our old place (US$2,200 – ouch!) because we agreed to take the new place after getting a verbal agreement from someone else that they’d take our old place. This happened three times, which, when combined with the pregnancy hormones coursing through my body right now, put me in a truly foul mood for several days. Poor Darling Man.

On the plus side … we have this handsome new neighboar …

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By: Barbara

A career girl who dropped out, traveled, found love, and never got around to going home again. Now wrangling a cross-cultural relationship and two third culture kids.