{8}

8 sleeps to go until we move in to our new home (the number of sleeps is how we count down to things in our house).

Well, I say 8 sleeps until we move in but it would be more accurate to say 8 sleeps until we complete on our new home. We may actually get to sleep in our new home on that day too but we won't have fully moved in for at least another couple of days.

For those of you who don't know (and those of you who do, skip on ahead to the next paragraph) we have moved back in to the same little cul-de-sac that we lived in before we went to Canada and bizarrely enough we are also now buying another house in the same little street. So, to cut a long story short, we owned and then sold No.2, we are currently renting No.4 and we will be completing on No.7, in just over a week. And there are only 8 houses in the street! So by my calculations we will have occupied..... think, think, think..... 37.5% of the homes (sorry, it's the accountant in me


) in our little road.

The plan for Day 1 (my plan not Richard's - he is not known for his planning) is as follows:

• Remove unit from kitchen to accommodate dishwasher



• Remove unit from utility room to accommodate tumble dryer



• Dismantle, carry across the huge distance (about 10m, or even less!) the beds and then re-assemble them, hopefully in the correct rooms



• Ditto for the kitchen table, known affectionately in our house as die Eckbank gruppe (because that's what it's called in Germany where we bought it)



• Take over some kitchen essentials, kettle, bowls, mugs

And so ends Day 1.

Day 2 will be for moving over small items of furniture and getting prepared for Day 3, when we are getting a local firm to come and shift all the large, bulky and heavy pieces of furniture. I know it seems strange to get someone to help us move such a short distance but it's really much more practical to do so - and saves me breaking my back! And then, because we have almost a 2 week cross over period, where we will still have both the rental place and the new house, we can take our time moving boxes over and actually have the luxury of unpacking at an unhurried pace and be able to really think about what is going to go where.

That's the plan anyway but we all know about best laid plans and such, don't we?