So having sat in the barbers blogging about how I hated the borrowed car I then proceeded to head back to the old house to get stuff out of the loft. In order to make space for the neighbours I moved the car to make room… and was promptly rear ended.
Now, this is an open and public forum and we’re still sorting out the whole mess so you’ll forgive me if I’m light on details here, but, suffice to say I was being ultra careful, which is why I was a little surprised to hear a screeching of brakes follow by a bang as I acquired a peugeot up my arse.
This was load 1 of 3 or 4 I wanted to bring from the house that day. Needless to say not much more moving happened that day. Getting out of that house is proving to be an absolute bitch 
The only plus side of the whole sorry tale is that the car I was driving was on loan from the garage and didn’t contain Willow. They remain unharmed. The same cant be said for my flash guns which were in the back of the car.
We moved out of Little Cottage this weekend and into Rented Flat. Rented flat has two more bedrooms that Little Cottage and the living room is quite a bit larger so we have more space for Willow and she now has her own room.
Moving day itself wasn’t too stressful. We’d moved 4 Po loads (not quite as much as you Might imagine, Po is quite small) already and we’d hired a removal company to shift our furniture. That’s not to say there wasn’t stress.
Two days before the move we discovered that the removal company had no knowledge of our booking and there was a period where I didn’t know what was going to happen with the larger bits of furniture or how we were going to move them. To compensate for this we did move rather a lot more with the removal company than they’d quotes me for, filling an entire 3.5 ton truck with our stuff (its amazing how much Little Cottage held). All that was left was a bit in the bathroom, a bit in the bedroom, the kitchen, the loft and the shed.
The plan for the remaining items was to leave Willow with her grandparents and spend Sunday with a borrowed car with much more carrying capacity (5 Pos? Maybe more) and shift the majority of the remainder. Then it snowed. Heavily. Sunday was spent sorting Rented Flat and moving had to be crammed in between other things on Monday. Suffice to say half the kitchen, the loft and the shed still need to be done. That will happen next weekend now.
Aft deciding that We Are Going To Rent we promptly had second thoughts. Renting is a pain. It means we could have to move twice in quick succession, which sucks at the best of times, but with a small one in tow is going to be even worse and I just hate the fact that I can do things to the house. That said it’s a temporary measure and I will live pretty much anywhere as long as I have a few basic things1.
Buying is also awkward. We’re in a God awful limbo whereby tens of thousands of pounds are tied up in other property and yet more money will be coming… at some point2. If I could release all of that and go buy somewhere tomorrow we’d be laughing. But we can’t and actual money available for a deposit is small and may need to be used to make Little Cottage fit to rent.
So, our options are:
- Do nothing. Stay in a 1 bedroom house with a little one who lives in the living room.
- Rent and wait for a deposit to either arrive or be saved before buying.
- Buy something cheap temporarily, possibly pushing the budget so we could be asking parents for money if we don’t have rental income one month.
- Sell Little Cottage, almost certainly at a slight loss, but somewhere new with the money that unlocks.
- Sell everything (for a big loss), go buy something (ironically smaller than if we just sold Little Cottage due to lost money) and no longer have multiple mortgages to deal with.
- Sell everything, do a runner, enjoy a year abroad before returning home destitute.
I don’t think selling my flat is really an option so well take that off the table. We’ll know more about the rental and sale potential of Little Cottage on Thursday and in the mean time we’ll just have to continue scouring the rental and property markets. The only thing I assure of from the entire process is that what the meticulous spreadsheet I’ve put together says I should have left in my account each month and what I do have left in the account don’t match. I need to curb my spending :S
1 Internet, somewhere to set up and play on the play station, that kind of thing 
2 With some point supposedly last August but actually being any time between tomorrow and… well, whenever really. Could be years.
The downside of having a bijoux residence, such as Little Cottage, is that careful planning needs to be done when buying stuff. If something comes in then something may well have to leave. Normally we’re very mindful of this and, as a result we happily fit in our home. Nubbin, on the other hand, doesn’t give a monkeys about this and is acquiring stuff at an alarming rate.
Both The Zozo and I have been preparing for Nubbins arrival for a while now. We replaced our bed with on that had loads of storage under it. We’ve cleared out things that are not needed and put masses of stuff in the loft.
A few days ago Nubbins bed arrived. It’s a very cool hammock thing that gently rocks Nubbin to sleep and keeps them comfortably wrapped. It’s also quite large. It became quite obvious that, no matter how much we moved stuff about we just didn’t quite have the space.
The elephant in the room here is my ‘office’. One side of the bedroom has my computer, filing cabinet, bookshelf and various other bits and bobs, all of which takes up rather a lot of space. If we could move the computer and pack up the desk we’d get quite a large area back and we’d all fit neatly. The $64,000 question was where would the computer go? Storage was not an option here.
In the end I killed two birds with one stone. I’m forever bitching at work that the hardware I have access to at home is vastly superior to that at the office. Work are also reasonably happy for us to supply our own hardware, provided we support it. A quick chat with my manager later and all was agreed.
Yesterday I drove into work early with the computer and set it up, moving the work supplied hardware to a desk behind me for the time being. I still need to transport my chair to the office and pack away the desk in the bedroom, but for now I have a fancy setup at work and we will soon have oodles of space at home