So[!] It started with a light panic attack, which turned into a mild panic attack, and then I went to Martha Steward blog and read about her move. The [G] saw trouble coming and suggested we take a walk through the house to calm down the situation...and now it has turned into a full blown PANIC ATTACK. Walking through the house with the [G] did not help at all, as he pointed out that only 1/100th of the "'stuff" in the house was his, and that would take him a morning to pack.
His main concern was, that we were going to have massive fights about getting rid of stuff, but he now realised that it was all my problem as the other 99% of the "stuff" in the house was mine.......whaaaaaaaaa.
If you are Martha Steward your moving sounds something like this............."I recently sold Turkey Hill, my beloved home for the last 35 years. I actually moved two years ago to Katonah, in New York, and was ensconced in my new old farm there, so I had plenty of time to plan the formal, final move.
It had been my intention, once Turkey Hill was sold, to move everything the 25 miles from place to place with my own staff. Turkey Hill was filled to the brim with furniture, mirrors, lighting fixtures, and "stuff.""
It's not that I have'nt done anything, its more that i have just been moving stuff around. Not one box has been packed, yet. But i have been sorting and sifting through stuff. Ok, i got terribly side tracked and have been living in a state of "memory lane" the last couple of days.
Look what i found. The [G] grandparents old slide projector and slide....this weekend we are having a slide show.
and just for a little freak out i found these as well, and their little eyes have been haunting me the last couple of nights, are they the lost cousins of chucky the vampire slayer, or who's that little chucky guy...
So[!] we found a house to rent. It actually found us. February I posted an ad on Gumtree & Junk Mail reading.
HOUSE WANTED! Couple 40+ looking for pet friendly (1 x mini & 1x Bouvier dog - well behaved) 3 Bedroom or 2 + study home with garage & servants room. Kenridge, Proteavalley, Durbanville or surrounding areas...
Rather a tall order I would say, we are not just moving, we are moving our whole live, and we have many “people” to consider Katrien the housekeeper, Rogan & Koos the dogs as well as Voêl the Parrot. If it were’nt for us they would have happily lived ever after at Tafelberg Road.
The day before I placed the advertisement we went to look at the first rental house. The moment I walked into the house, I knew that I could not live there. It was a massive house, with many many rooms, but it had no soul. It was dark, with a horrible unkempt garden. This was just after we heard our house was sold, and I think the [G] had a little panic attack, we haven’t rented a house for many years, and had no idea as to what was available. The agent did not help either, she told us that houses with our criteria were the minority. There and then [G] just wanted to sign on the dotted line. If we were sitting at a table I could have kicked him, but we were standing in the entrance hall of the house, eventually with oodles of eyebrow raising and sign language he got the message.
So[!] I decided to take charge of the house hunting, and that is when I placed the advertisement. The very next day I got an email offering us a beautiful house - I told you before, we have always been lucky in our house searching.
More about this as soon as we have signed the contract.
.....Today, eight years and six and a half months later, this is were I am writing from. Ready to pack up and say farewell to the house we lovingly renovated and custom made for ourselves ......
So[!) what now everybody is asking.... Those of you who know us personally will remember that we originally put the house on the market because we were going to move to "the Farm", well by the grace of God that whole deal did'nt materialise and we are staying in town for the time being. We have'nt ruled out the idea to a aquire a little farm somewhere, it has just been put on ice.
So[!) we have 37 days to pack up 8 years of collecting. We are going to rent a place for a year to take a break from home owning and to decide where we want to live in the greater Cape Town.
April thirtieth 2010 it will be eight years and eight months and a couple of hours that we have lived in our, as we call it, first “groot mens” (adult) house.
Where it all started!
You could call us serial movers. Since we fell in love and moved in together, April 1994, yes we did in the first month we met. We moved 14 times in 16 years, not bad going.
In the beginning, we lived with a quadriplegic friend in his townhouse, I slept over thinking that he didn’t know, three months later he said “you don’t have to say goodbye anymore at night, I know you stay over” – he never charged me rent and he even shared his Ballantine's whisky with us. Thanks to him, I have my dream engagement ring. Eventually we had to give our friend his space back, and to thank him for his generosity, we took him to a Sting concert at Sun City, which was awesome, I missed out on Sting in London after he contracted laryngitis and the show was postponed to the day I came back to SA.
We moved to a cottage on a milk farm, where we counted the flies on the ceiling on a Sunday afternoon for entertainment. At least we had a washing machine – sold my piano to buy - never got past grade 8 in piano lessons in anyway, and still can only play chopsticks, real fast. We raided our parents houses while they were on a weekend away, so we had a couch and a pot and pan as well. After a couple of months, the smell and the flies got the better of us and we moved to the inner city, to a semi-detached house, in the same street just on the other side of the railroad track where my hubby was born. The previous tenants were art students and they painted the walls to look like brickwork, and I painted the bathroom tiles to look like a chessboard. We had lots of fun in this house; we played monopoly in winter and kept the glue wine hot on the oil radiator. We didn’t have a stove and it didn’t bother us, crisps and red wine, beer in summer, the odd take away at the roadhouse, a free slice of pizza if you go to the disco before 7pm, what more do you need. Later on my mom couldn’t handle it anymore and gave us a two-plate counter-top stove with an oven, which was stolen the day before we moved out, together with all our shoes and winter jackets. In this house we got our first pet – Felix the cripple cat.
A year later when we got married, we bought our first, a semi-detached townhouse on the banks of a little stream – which we never saw in daylight, I think in the 5 months we lived there we cooked 3 meals in the kitchen. We might as well have rented a room in a motel, this place was just a base to sleep and shower, 1996 was the year of weddings and leaving for overseas in our group of friends, so we were constantly going to going away, kitchen teas & bachelor parties, and then off course the actual wedding as well.
Eventually you have to stop partying, we thought a change is a good as a holiday and so we decided to move to the west coast, where we lived in a small new town development called Jacobsbaai with a then population of 150. We were close to the youngest people in town, bar a couple of school going children. We arrived on the west coast for our new adventure 5 August 1996, 5 months after our wedding. At first, we lived with G’s uncle, and then we rented a cottage at a holiday resort, after which we rented a cottage on the beach with paving bricks for a floor, and the most exquisite view. The problem with renting is that, eventually the landlords always want to either sell the house or move back in. We also stayed in a half build house, where we flooded the house every time we took a shower. Here Felix our cat walked straight into a dog’s mouth. Chica the Bouvier followed her, and later Archie the rescue Bouvier join us as well, we lost both our Bouvier to a trigger-happy sheepherder. Our last abode in Jacobsbay was an old renovated goat shed called the Ramhok, with a hearth so big you could sit in it. By then our little nest egg was rapidly running out, but we ate from the sea everyday, crayfish by the dozens, mussels, limpets and rice. Eventually the semi-recession with sky high interest rates hit this development as well, with our nest egg depleted we realized that we had to without further delay go back to the real world of city living and job hunting.
October 1998. Cape Town here we come. For a month we floated between friends sleeping on couches and sharing bedrooms with kids, then we stayed with my aunt (bless her soul) in her second bedroom, I never knew this until much later, my mum gave her money to foot our food bill with her. I poured her drinks at night and G cleaned the kitchen, she was quite the avid cook. Mothers they are just the best. Jobs found us or did we find job, regardless 3 months later we could afford to move into our own place.
Our first city residence was a one-bedroom apartment in Campsbay, with parquet floors and a big old bath. Oh, that was wonderful days, we did not have much money but we walked on the beach everyday, we even had a Poloni-slice-size view of the ocean if you hanged halfway over the balcony with your legs strapped to the door. Totally ignoring the fact that we were spending most of our little money on gas to get to work on the other side of town. Never the less, the view when you go over the neck in the afternoons, made up for the Marmite bread dinners. We kept the commuting up for over a year, until we babysat friends’ children for 2 weeks in the northern suburbs – were we both worked – and realized that we would actually save money and time to live on the side of town where you worked.
We found a partly furnished house in an estate, we had enough cutlery and crockery to fill only one cupboard in the kitchen, our television was so small and the lounge so big that we just gave up watching television, only after we moved in we realized that the estate was unofficially a retirement village. This time round, we were the youngest people in the village, but we got the opportunity to brush up on our Bridge skills every Wednesday night at the clubhouse and we never had a shortage in late afternoon cocktail participants. We had the half-Olympic size pool to ourselves for late night skinny-dipping. Every Friday night we had drinks with the distinguished ladies and gentleman of the estate; all dressed up in their Friday bests, at the clubhouse and learned many life lessons from them. I do love old people they are so clever.
Six months later and a day after we said we really feel settled now, the landlord decided to sell the house. Maybe a good thing as we were rapidly doing a reversed Benjamin Button. By then and with hard work and a couple of job changes we were almost back on our feet financially, and with grandpa’s generous offer to help, we were able to buy a property of our own again.
We have always been very lucky when house hunting, we usually sign by the second property we view, and again the house fairy was on our side. We were very happy in our three bedroom green roofed semi Cape Dutch style townhouse with the spiral staircase, two years later and many wall colors and garden changes we decided to sell up and “sail”. We found ourselves a lovely fix-me-upper, the proverbial worst house in the “best” neighborhood. Today, eight years and six and a half months later, this is were I am writing from. Ready to pack up and say farewell to the house we lovingly renovated and custom made for ourselves over the past 8 years. I never thought it would be possible for me to set down roots for so long, but alas, you can always surprise yourself.
Disclaimer: Just for the record, i have full consent from the "boss" to blog about this whole moving issue. He is a very private person, and i felt that i should "ask" him, and since he is part of this i felt it just fair to inform him that i am going to blog about this. I on the other have always proclaimed that i am a private, i have learned now that it is not true, I have a Facebook profile and a Twitter account and this and other blogs, and seem to tell everybody that's prepared to listen everything about everything, in serious cases i'll do it anonymously. I just feel the more you bounce your ideas and your life off other people the easier life is.
this will soon be up and running, i just need to get my ducks in a row. not yet sure if i want to consolidate or keep separate blogs. al[so] i want to set up this blog properly from scratch before i start blogging. when i am done procrastinating about this, that and the other and cut down on my farming on farmville (my guilty pleasure), start going to bed later than i already do - i am a "late to bed difficult to rise type personality". i will begin with [s0!]
in the meantime have a seat and take a break, if i could' i'd offer you a glass of wine.
