A Moving Experience

In the last 24 hours I've had to completely dismantle and remove everything from my room. In the next 24 hours I will need to completely reassemble and return everything to my room. It sounds almost as if I'm moving, and in an odd kind of way I am, except where I'm moving to is exactly where I'm moving from.

Allow me to elaborate.

We moved into our current property 13 years ago, when my parents decided rather than renting, they would like to invest in a long term property. Actually, we didn't move in until many months later, once you decide to buy a house you need find a house, wait for auction day, out auction everyone, settle the contract, wait for the old people to move everything out, and then finally move everything in, before moving yourself in. In fact, I myself didn't move in until several months later still, as at the time I was staying with my father up in Darwin.

In some ways it was quite a small house for the five of us, and eventually the six of us when my younger brother came along (I don't mean he just wandered by and moved in. He was, you know, born). So after a while (read: five years) we decided to renovate. This was a lengthy endeavour, and involved building a new kitchen, two new bathrooms, a new living room, new wood panneling, and new carpets.

How lengthy? Well, we started eight years ago. And we put the carpets in today. In our defence, everything else was done years ago, but as the carpet was a particuliarly complicated job we had been holding off on. Finally we decided several months ago that enough was enough and it was time to finish the renovations.

One of the 'really should have seen this coming' side effects of replacing your carpets is that you can't have anything on the carpet when it is replaced. So everything in all the carpeted rooms needs to be taken out and moved into a non carpeted area of the house. Now I pretty much live almost entirely in my room. Bed, computer, tv, books, reading chair and writing desk are all in the one room. The only thing I don't have in there is a kitchen or a bathroom, and on the whole I think everyone is glad of that.

But it does mean that my room is rather densely packed. For example. My parents, to prepare for the new carpets, had to move their bed, two bedside tables, and a filing cabinet out of their room. I needed to move a bed, a desk, a computer, two monitors, a tv, a tv stand, associated electronics, a cabinet, a bookcase, dvd racks and about 5 million cables.

I'm not complaining. It was rather satisfying work and will give me a chance to do some reorganising while moving everything. It did however unfortunately mean that I was up until midnight carrying furniture and then got up at six to finish it off, as they were arriving at the wonderfully prompt time of 8am. Since then I've mainly been out walking as there's really not much to do while trapped in the back room as people kindly install new carpets for you.

So I'm a bit tired. But after 13 years, it will be awfully nice to have the renovations finished.