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.

     Well, this past week has been a tad manic. On Saturday evening I finished my last ever shift in work which was far more emotional that I had anticipated! I was greeted with flowers, a card & a mahoosive cookie and lots of hugs. I was fortunate to work with an amazing bunch of people and I will truly miss them.

 Firstly, Apologies for the radio silence between my first post and this one, TJ and I went on holiday the week after the last post and we've been super busy with work and the house since then. But I'm back! Today has been the first real motion towards prepping the house for the move and we're feeling pretty good about it so far. We started the morning off by going round the various rooms in the house and picking out items that we wouldn't need or want for the move to try and condense the volume of stuff for packing in the van.





TJ got out his fancy tape and placed a strip on the floor to map out what was going to the charity shop and what was heading to the dump. This made life so much easier as we could just plonk things on the floor and there was still a modicum of organisation.




This was the result of a brief skim through the kitchen cupboards. It's so difficult to make the judgement call on what can be tossed when you can't be 100% sure you won't need it again before you leave. We've tried to be as ruthless as possible even though it was only a small amount of things that we moved today.

So once the piles were sorted on the living room floor, we collected up the items headed for the dump and we went and disposed of them. After the dump we made our way to our local Tesco supermarket and pleaded with the very nice fruit & veg man* if we could take some boxes off his hands.


*Note: He himself was not actually made from fruit & veg (Just to clarify).



We were obviously in the right place at the right time because the nice man in Tesco's appeared with a big stack of boxes for us to take for free. This is definitely the thing to try if you need boxes. We see people in the likes of IKEA actually buying boxes for moving and they could save so much money!



The latter part of the day was spent packing up the charity shop items into the car then dropping them off and getting a celebratory cup of coffee. Last stop was to Home Bargains for home cleaning supplies. The house is a little run down but we're determined to leave it in the best possible condition and get most of our deposit back so we can put it towards our mortgage fund!

   Let me start with a bit of background, set the scene as such. My name is Megan, I'm 23 and from Northern Ireland originally. I have spent the last five years living in England and at least the last three years wondering why on earth i'm still here.