The house had been empty since December, and not very well cared for before that. All the physical bits of the house are ok, if a bit old.

It was mucky though. Filthy.

The kitchen was dreadful. Greasy cupboards, dust stuck in the grease.

All the floors were dirty. The walls were mucky.

So we set about cleaning it. Then I invited my parents up to see it, and my Mum took one look at the kitchen and started cleaning it :)

We cleaned and moved bits and bobs, and cleaned some more.

We hired a carpet cleaning machine, and cleaned all the carpets.

All the time RR was packing up the old house. Everything went into boxes. All the furniture that could go into pieces did, and I used cable ties to bind everything together, with little bags full of screws and nuts and bolts.

Then the removal men came, and loaded up their van with all our furniture and boxes. Our entire house fitted into their van.

Then we drove to the new house, and they unloaded all our furniture and boxes into it.

And stole £5 from my daughter.^[1]

We ended up with a lot of furniture in the garage. Even though the new house has more rooms, there is a lot of stuff built in already, like drawers and wardrobes. So we've got an awful lot of stuff and no where to put it.

Then my Mum and Dad came down again the next day, and helped us unpack, and shuffle furniture around, and move boxes ready to be unpacked into different rooms.

We made up beds in the kids rooms. Then found that the beds we had are 3 cm too big to fit into the space, so we have to buy new beds for two rooms.

We swapped light fittings around. Did you know that even if you turn the light off at the switch, the wires are still live? That was something I knew once, but had a sharp reminder about yesterday. 230V hurts, even if you just get a small jolt of it. Always turn off the circuit you're working on folks.

We put all the kids rooms together, unpacked most of the books we have shelves for. Unpacked nearly everything. Flat packed the boxes again, vacuumed up the mess we'd made unpacking everything. Then collapsed and ordered pizza while I tried to get the broadband working.

We've got fibre broadband (FTTC) at the new house. That needs two boxes. One supplied by BT, one by our broadband supplier.

Our broadband supplier sent us the wrong box. It had the wrong firmware on to work in a FTTC setup. You need to configure it as PPPoE to talk to the BT box, but this one was configured as PPPoA which is normal for non-fibre installs. That took me a while to figure out, as it did have a setting for PPPoE, it just didn't work.

So I had to connect by computer directly to the BT box, set up a PPPoE session and download the right firmware, flash the box, and then set it up again.

Then it worked.

20mb down, 2mb up. Yeah baby.

Tired, but happy.

Now, we just need to start decorating.

^[1] When my Mum and Dad came to visit, my Mum gave the kids £5 each. Grandparents like giving grandchildren money. It fell out of my daughters pocket when she was in her new bedroom. I'd found it and put it on the side in our room. When the removal men left, the money had gone. It hasn't just been lost under boxes or something, it's gone.