It is well known that moving house is one of the most stressful things you can do in your life, and this post merely reinforces that perception.
I spent the last few weeks carefully packing all of my things away and labelling all of the boxes. My stuff had to be taken a few hundred miles and went to be stored free time by the removal company. Unfortunately for me this company chose to put several customers containers in the same area as one another.
I guess you have already realise what’s coming next. You see the containers were provided by the removals company, so we had all packed our stuff into the same type of boxes. When I began to receive my possessions at my new house I immediately realised there was a problem as the handwriting on some of the boxes was not my own. Somehow this removal company had managed to mix up five of my boxes with those of another customer and all of my kitchen utensils ended up being delivered to the wrong address 70 miles away.
Despite notifying the removal company straightaway they decided to collect the boxes from their other customer the following day. It never occurred to them to phone this customer on the day I told them about this problem, they assumed (wrongly of course) that they would be around the following day unpacking.
Unfortunately that was not the case, the other customer had left town for the weekend and it was a further three days before I was able to retrieve the stuff I needed for my kitchen.
On top of this I found my laptop had been damaged and a couple of pieces of glass had been broken.
Another gripe was with my telephone company, who despite having supplied the previous occupants of my new home said that the line would have to be disconnected and reconnected again. I just could not get my head around this, I was already a customer of this company as where the previous occupants of my new house, so, that should not have been any other companies involved. In fact there were no other companies involved, only with this one. Nevertheless they saw fit to press the reset button as it were terminating both my telephone and Internet connection until eventually could come out of the house and turn it back on again.
The telephone access was quickly restored, that was no big deal as I have a cell phone anyway. But my Internet access (DSL) took a further two weeks to be enabled. I never realised how much I’ve come to rely on the Internet or how much I would miss not having a high-speed access to it through my PC. I managed to keep getting e-mails through my Blackberry, but it really wasn’t the same.
Then the roof started to leak. I was particularly angry about this one as it was clear that it had been an ongoing issue which had been botched up by the previous occupants just to sell the house. So, within a few days at page roofer to come out and stop the water leaking down the bedroom wall.
Then there was the heating boiler. It turns out there is a small fault which turns the water cold periodically, usually in the middle of a shower.
Oh yes, and when my kitchen utensils to arrive the shelf in the kitchen collapse has tried to track the stuff away.
The TV reception was no good and had to pay someone else to come out to source the satellite dish out.
The list of problems I found just goes on and on, I’m not going to go on any more about it in this post, except for one final crucial that infuriating example.
I needed to use my hosepipe to wash down the path. When I came to screw the fitting (that I had just bought specially for the purpose) to the tap I found that the thread on the tap was just one or 2 mm bigger than the standard screw fittings found on those attachments. It took me a full two hours to-ing and fro-ing between different shops before I managed to find a connector that would allow me to turn my host on.
All of these issues are very petty and trivial and I feel a bit embarrassed about letting them get to me as they have, I guess it’s just the fact that all of these issues just kept coming and coming one after the other after the other period of a couple of weeks. By the end of it I just wanted my life back. Fortunately, it’s all done now and I absolutely love my new home.
It’s in a greater area, the neighbours are nice, the house gets lots of sunshine throughout the day. It’s peaceful, there is a park nearby, it is convenient for both getting out of the country and in terms of local services and shops, so all in all I shouldn’t really complain.