Project New Home: 2 Weeks Later...

We have moved!

After 2 full weeks of living in our new home, we have to say we love it!

The big move on Friday 19 November went better than expected. Admittedly, Jonathan and I were still finishing the packing at around 1.30am the day of the move. By the time we finally fell into bed, we could manage about 3 hours of shut eye before the alarm sounded to start the day. We were so careful with the packing and the labelling during our early stages of packing, but by Thursday night / early Friday morning, we were just keen to chuck everything into boxes and get them over to the new house!

The company we hired was fantastic - we were so pleased with the way Darren and his boys from Hills Professional Removals & Storage handled the move, with utmost professionalism, courtesy and friendliness, and took great care of all of our belongings, and even took out the garbage for us! We filled a medium sized truck, and half of the big truck, and it took 4 guys nearly 6 hours to move our stuff from the apartment to the new house, including dismantling and reassembling a few pieces of furniture along the way. We were so pleased with them that we ended up giving them the only 6 pack of beer we had on hand!

Within an hour of Darren and his boys leaving, our brand new fridge and washing machine / dryer combo was delivered. This delivery has been quite painful, after suffering 2 setbacks with the scheduled deliveries. In the end, it was worth the wait, and we were the proud new owners of a sparkling new fridge and a wizz bang washing machine / dryer.

Surrounded by boxes, and with most of our Ikea furniture in place (after Jonathan spent Tuesday with men who specialised in putting together Ikea furniture), we took ourselves to lunch before we tackled the mammoth task of unpacking. It proved to be a good move!

The first room that received attention was the kitchen. We managed to unpack most of the kitchen stuff on the Friday, with the rest completed on the Saturday morning. Bit by bit, we unpacked a lot more other boxes, putting everything away in spaces that we now have, and standing back and admiring our work. There were still quite a few boxes by the time Grace and her kids arrived for morning tea on Saturday morning, and less boxes by the time Mina arrived on Sunday morning, but we were pleased with our progress.

By Monday evening, we only had books to unpack and load into our brand new bookshelves. We really wanted to finish all the unpacking before Mina came for the weekend, as it was a sleepover weekend, so Jonathan put in the hard yards and emptied the remaining boxes, hoping that Darren would swing by and pick up the boxes as soon as they were ready. Unfortunately, 2 weeks later, our garage is still the proud storage facility for Darren's boxes. Hopefully, we will be rid of them by Wednesday or Thursday next week.

Today, looking around the house, we still have a few boxes, which we'll get around to emptying soon. The boxes contain our brand new dining chairs, and cables, and a lot of other bits and bobs. Jonathan has sorted through the books and he's happily arranged his books on one bookshelf. I need to get around to sorting through my books and working out which ones to keep and which ones are to be donated to charity. I also need to sort through my cooking magazines, which I'm sure I'll get around to doing one day soon.

We are loving our new house, and are now well and truly settled in. The last room to configure is the baby's room, and we still have a little bit of time to do that, so we'll get around to that next week. We have now bought a bassinet for Speedy to sleep in our room, so at least that has been put together and is ready to go. Everything else can wait.

We've had our first visitor in the house - my cousin Joy has spent the last few days with us, and we hope she's enjoyed staying in our new home as much as we have enjoyed her company!

We have plenty of photos - see for yourself. We can't wait to show our new home off to everyone - once Speedy's here and we've settled in, please feel free to drop by!