Morning Folks!
As I type on this bright and sunny Thursday morning, I have (officially) thirteen days left in England. THIRTEEN. Madness.
This past week has been another busy one, we're finally getting into the swing of packing and while it's great that we're making a good dent on the stuff in the house, it's driving me sightly mad already. Unlike most moves where you have a new property to gradually move all your boxes and furniture in to, we are having to wait until move day to try and cram all our worldly belongings into a van and a car and ship them to a new country. Whose smart idea was that?! Needless to say, the house is a state.
This is how the living room situation is looking. Nice, right? Cosy. Thankfully, the bags and boxes at the front of the pile in the photo were all shipped off to the charity shop and the dump so we've got a little more space to play with.
If you're moving and you're a charitable sod, I would 100% recommend doing a quick search for a donation station. We found this Age UK station just up the road from our house and it has made donating goods a million times easier. Before we found this, we were having to park at a shopping centre and fill up a trolley or two with our bags and boxes and then wheel everything through the shopping centre to get into their tiny charity shop or there was the other option of driving right across town to the other tiny charity shop which wasn't always taking donations as they had too much already. This place is amazing though, it's a huge building all dedicated to the charity, you can park right outside the door and it's really easy to get to. Perfect! Plus, we'd rather donate than just dump our unwanted items; just because we don't want them anymore doesn't mean that someone else couldn't benefit from them.
As well as donating to charity, we also thought we'd get rid of some games and DVDs. TJ had an old Xbox & I had a PS3 both with a bunch of games that we didn't play anymore. We decided that we wanted to trade up and save for a ps4 together. The best place we found for trading up was CEX.
As I type on this bright and sunny Thursday morning, I have (officially) thirteen days left in England. THIRTEEN. Madness.
This past week has been another busy one, we're finally getting into the swing of packing and while it's great that we're making a good dent on the stuff in the house, it's driving me sightly mad already. Unlike most moves where you have a new property to gradually move all your boxes and furniture in to, we are having to wait until move day to try and cram all our worldly belongings into a van and a car and ship them to a new country. Whose smart idea was that?! Needless to say, the house is a state.
This is how the living room situation is looking. Nice, right? Cosy. Thankfully, the bags and boxes at the front of the pile in the photo were all shipped off to the charity shop and the dump so we've got a little more space to play with.
If you're moving and you're a charitable sod, I would 100% recommend doing a quick search for a donation station. We found this Age UK station just up the road from our house and it has made donating goods a million times easier. Before we found this, we were having to park at a shopping centre and fill up a trolley or two with our bags and boxes and then wheel everything through the shopping centre to get into their tiny charity shop or there was the other option of driving right across town to the other tiny charity shop which wasn't always taking donations as they had too much already. This place is amazing though, it's a huge building all dedicated to the charity, you can park right outside the door and it's really easy to get to. Perfect! Plus, we'd rather donate than just dump our unwanted items; just because we don't want them anymore doesn't mean that someone else couldn't benefit from them.
As well as donating to charity, we also thought we'd get rid of some games and DVDs. TJ had an old Xbox & I had a PS3 both with a bunch of games that we didn't play anymore. We decided that we wanted to trade up and save for a ps4 together. The best place we found for trading up was CEX.
We rocked up to our local store with two boxes and a bag full of stuff and the poor guy at the counter spent a good 45 minutes going through everything with us. The guys in there were amazing, I've never had bad service in there because they're just a bunch of really down to earth guys.
Here's TJ admiring the mahoosive receipt we got at the end of our little trip to CEX.
When you trade in to CEX, you can opt for either cash or in-store credit. We opted for the store credit as we'll be looking to get our PS4 console there so with trading in our old stuff, we're well on our way to the new stuff! Plus, their expiry for store credit is a thousand years. Yup, you read that correctly,
our credit is valid until 3016. Can't argue with that now, can you?
The latter part of the week was spent starting to touch up the flaws in the house. It wasn't 100% by any means when we moved in, but we want to leave it looking as best we can get it. We've taken all the pictures off the walls and removed all the hooks and nails, filled in the gaps with plaster and we're now on the hunt for paint.
These paints had been left in the garden by the last tenant, but we opened them to find that they'd all separated and looked kind of disgusting, so they went straight to the dump. On the bright side, we got the names and colours off all the tubs so we can match new paints to them so it wasn't all bad.
Before & After
TJ had suggested buying 'Magic Erasers' which weren't something I'd heard of before but I would 100% recommend them now. They just look like a block of white foam, but you run them under water and then attack any marks on the walls or doors and it takes them straight off! A word of warning though- If you use them on the walls, scrub lightly as they can lift the paint off otherwise.
Lastly, to break up the monotony of cleaning and tidying I went to my local blood donation session to give blood. This was my 11th donation and it's something that I really enjoy doing. For something that takes so little, it can do a whole lot. So why not?
(Sorry if anyone seeing this is squeamish)
It's always the same group of nurses when I go to donate and they're brilliant. They love to have a bit of a chat and they put you right at ease. I'll miss them when I move. If you've never donated before, I'd recommend giving it a go! They give you tea & biscuits at the end.
Tea AND Biscuits.
Just let that sink in.
This upcoming week is going to be a tad nuts, I'm part of a musical theatre group and we've a show on next week so when i'm not packing, i'll be performing. I can't wait, I adore theatre and being on stage but it means the week is going to be a busy one. If you're reading this & you live in the north west of England, you should most definitely come and see us. The show is going to be insane.
Shameless promotion...
Until next time,
