You Can’t Go Home Again

Well, we’re here! And after all of my angst about moving, I walked out of our old house for the very last time… and I didn’t even know it.

Due to a complicated sequence of events which I won’t bore you with (Because trust me, I have MORE than enough to bore you with already, without adding that into the mix, too!) we were given access to the new house a little early. By Thursday afternoon, I had finished packing up the old house, so the plan was that I would head to the new place (with my long-suffering mother) and spend a couple of hours cleaning it, before coming home to help Terry start loading up the truck we’d hired, ready to move the next morning.

Well, the first part of that plan worked out just fine, and my mum and I made it to the new house, where we were joined by my dad as soon as he finished work. (Major props  to my parents, by the way, who have spent the last few days working their asses off, as well as providing food and emotional support: could not have done it without them. Special thanks to my mum for pulling that lump of someone else’s hair out of the shower drain, because I DEFINITELY couldn’t have done that without her…). Back at our old house, however, two of our friends turned up and volunteered to help Terry start loading up the truck: awesome! After a while, they realised that with the three of them working on it, they could get the house totally emptied by that night, which left us with two options:

1. Pack everything into the truck, and spend the night at my parents’ place, so all we’d have to do the next day would be unload it all at the new place.

2. Pack everything but the bed, and a few other things we’d need in the morning, then spend the night in the existing house, as we’d planned, before packing the remaining things in the morning.

For me, this was a total no-brainer. The whole time we’d been cleaning the new house, my stomach had been churning with anxiety at the thought of having to go back home and do the whole, “This is the last time I’ll ever…” over and over and over again. By the time I should have been leaving to head back there, I was an absolute wreck, and I knew that if I had to say goodbye, in that long-drawn-out, melodramatic way of mine, I would totally fall apart, no question. So when Terry presented me with an option which would mean I wouldn’t actually HAVE to go back, and the worst part would already be behind me, I jumped at it. I said in this post that if I could miraculously find myself living in the new house, without having to say goodbye to the old one, that would suit me fine, and honestly, it really did. There wasn’t even a tiny part of me which was tempted to go back:  I didn’t NEED to say goodbye to the old house, because I’d been saying it for months already, and it was just SO MUCH EASIER to not have to go through the heart-wrenching emotion of walking out of that door knowing it would be the last time.

(Yes, Terry did have to do it, but Terry doesn’t share my sentimental streak, and he says he was so focused on actually MOVING that he didn’t really think about it.)

So I left my little house on Thursday morning, thinking I’d be gone for a couple of hours… and I never went back. I left my empty coffee mug on the desk, my laptop switched on, my dressing gown hanging on the back of the bathroom door, and everything just sitting there waiting for me to return to it. And I never will. (Huge thanks to Terry and our friends for packing up the things I’d left out, by the way: I DID have everything else packed, but not the things I thought I’d  need that night/the next morning!) I had a bit of a cry at the moment it was decided that was how we were going to do it, but since then I’ve been absolutely fine, and although I think part of that is purely because it just doesn’t feel real to me yet, I’ll take it.

As for the new house, well, we still love it: phew! We did a huge amount of work over the weekend (that wallpaper is now a thing of the past, I’m pleased to report), again thanks to my parents and a group of friends who we will seriously have to throw a party for soon: they’ve all been absolutely amazing. Most of the house is still a total mess, of course: you can’t see it in these photos because all but the last of these is of the master bedroom, and most of them were taken before we moved our stuff in. I think I’ll have to do a little more unpacking before I can show you the rest because right now you can’t actually see anything for boxes, and you’ve all seen boxes before, right?

Oh, and by the way: our new house has a view – you may as well brace yourself for all the Instagrams….

(P.S. Sorry for the crappy iPhone photos in this post: it took me two days to work out where I’d stashed the real camera during the move!)