House Move!

The big day finally came. Friday 27 May 2016 - and we moved house. The kids were both nervous and excited. The plan was that they went to school leaving the only home they had ever known, but came back home from school to a different house. Would mum and dad be there? Was this an elaborate plan to get rid of them?

Goodbye Old House.......

We'd invested a lot of time and effort in our current home  and our family had grown up there. I wasn't actively looking to move but was fairly open-minded about it. We'd been talking about a house move for several years and had even got as far as putting in offers on another house. The impetus to move was coming from my wife Gayle: with a growing family, wanting a bigger garden and thinking ahead to queues for the bathroom. With no off-road parking and my head full of all things -DS,  I'd told Gayle that if she could find a house with a suitable garage, I'd be 'in'.

............Hello New Home

Although the new house had little 'kerb appeal', my wife had the vision to see beyond that. The house move was about 'quality of life' and this house was going to deliver in spades. Good call Gayle xx. From my perspective this was a winner because, as well as ticking all the families boxes, it also had a double garage long enough for a DS and a small brick workshop behind.

As you can imagine, those first days and weeks in the new house were spent finding our feet: working out taps and fuses, getting keys cut, organising a phone, changing address with utilities. High on the agenda was a trampoline in the garden for the kids and building a guinea pig hutch: if a garage was my part of the house move deal, then a trampoline and pets were the kids.

Through all this, thoughts of getting my DS organised were never far away. In the run up to the move I'd emptied most of my DS bits out of the garden shed and back into my lock up. I'd left this as late as possible as I was worried about a break in at the lock up. I left a few sealed boxes in the shed but loose crates of bits and sloppy buckets of zinc plating acid and electrolyte were all taken to the lock up over a couple of days.

Initially the garage at our new house was full of boxes and furniture waiting for a spot in the house. As bits and pieces were unpacked, the garage as instead filled with empty boxes and the unwanted things our things replaced: old lamp shades, curtains and things destined for recycling and the tip. A couple of huge pine wardrobes we'd brought with us were sold on eBay and finally collected. As we began to find our feet, and starting with the boxes I'd moved from my garden shed, I started to trickle my DS things out of the lock up and into the new garage. Small bits went in the workshop.......

New Workshop - August 2016

......bigger bits went into the garage

New Garage - August 2016

Boy, there was a lot of it.....

Richard came to visit and we did a 'test fit' with his DS. Well, you would, wouldn't you?

"Back A Bit More" - 3 September 2016

The garage even had a car port with enough height to get a DS bonnet fully open and a wheelie bin to put your tea on. That was going to be very handy.