Moving Day

I hope this will have been the hardest day for a while. I’m in bed at midnight and feel pretty wrecked.

Today was moving — a friend from Loamshire games club Ed very kindly brought us a brand new van from his car dealership — and I’ve pretty much pushed the envelope today.

First was loading the van from Raveloe House, the country home of father-in-law Mr. H where we have been staying of late. Starting with the bulk of my library in cardboard cartons, and then clearing the conservatory porch then the summer house. Lovely and shiny and officially being used as a demonstrator as it was, Ed wasn’t able or willing to bring his van across the garden to the summer house to receive objects.

And honestly, I could not blame him — it is much akin to Pilton field after a particularly muddy festival and even the lawn tractor on its big balloon tyres struggled.

Which, coincidentally, is how the furniture went –in several trips on the tractor-trailer over the madness and to the hardstanding and the waiting Peugeot.

This was all incredibly time consuming, and actually took all morning, to my great surprise. Once driven to Milby itself we lunched on sausage sandwiches and got to work on unpacking. Totally awful — taking all those over heavy book cartons over the uneven ground, into the house, and up the stairs was tough stuff.

Even Mr H, who is accustomed to manual labour, said so. But the worst was to come. Among the furniture on board was the Victorian horsehair sofa. Like the dead weight of two men (n.b. check inside of sofa for corpses), it really broke us and we all needed a good cup of tea after.

That, alas was just the first job of the day. We’ve been renting some little space from our auctioneer Hugo in Sproxton to keep our larger auction purchases. Given the bill is already running at £150 I thought it time to use the van.

Most of it I’d never laid eyes on before — given I can’t get the time off work, usually, I send Mrs Revivalist or Mr H. to bid for me. So I was very pleased to see the handsome and solid AGA fridge and freezer, and the repro ten-place dining table with matching balloon back chairs. Also horse hair stuffed, coincidentally.

Hugo was his usual wry self, but proudly showed me Country Life from 1999 when he was in the front cover, red-coated and blowing his horn.

We had to give up on the AGAs as they were reassuringly heavy. One of them was also reassuringly broken, just the thing for a freezer you’ve spent £400 on. Thankfully once fixed up they will be worth five times that, given they are basically collector’s items.

Back to the house again, more unloading and by this time we are very tired and the monster dining table is an issue. Coming to the rescue is our new friend Daniel from down the street, who is a very good sport and helped us hump it up the stairs.

Note to self: get dining table into the dining room before painting hallways, legs scratching walls inevitable. Inevitable. Inevi-table. Heh.

Then onto final job –new dishwasher from Currys in Middlemarch. First home appliance I’ve ever bought new — generally I’m sensible and insist on second hand.

Finally back to the cottage, we throw everything left out of the van and then I take Mr. H’s car to Paddiford Common for pizza at max speed. Ella is at vicar’s in Raveloe for Christmas bash with my car.

Home again and we all eat. I crawl up to bed feeling like I’ve been hit by a bus. Do it all again tomorrow…