Camping at Home

The worst of the move is done and dusted and we are now living in our new home.

Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say, we are camping in the new house 😉 . As you can see, it’s still pretty chaotic …

That’s because most of our furniture remains in the old house.

After getting a quote for nearly $4000 to stage our home for sale, we decided to do it ourselves (I honestly thought we were 80% of the way there, but the property stylist wanted to take everything out and only use their items). Okay, I did spend a fair bit – mostly on Kmart homewares – but four thousand dollars? Seriously? We could BUY a whole house full of furniture for that price, and have something to keep (or sell if we want) at the end of the eight week period!

I think we did rather well (if I do say so myself) but the downside is, it’s really hard to unpack and settle into the new house when there’s no furniture to put anything in!

Before we moved in we had the house painted inside, air conditioning installed (and not a moment too soon – it’s been a scorcher this week in Queensland), and got new carpet laid. In preparation for the painting – and to save money – we took off all the door fittings ourselves, as well as the vertical blinds.

You guessed it, we still haven’t put the door fittings back on and apparently hubster is dead set keen on getting new ones so that will probably happen this weekend.

As for the vertical blinds – funny story. We took them all out and were storing them on the back undercover patio, where they would be protected from the elements, or so we thought.

Now I’m not a huge fan of verticals but we had every intention of putting them back in. However our friendly neighbourhood scrub turkey took a shine to them and made a real mess, pulling off many of the individual strips and dragging them down the back to his nest!

So for now we have just pinned up sheets or old curtains at the windows.

So what do I mean by camping at home? Well, we’re sleeping on a mattress on the floor. It’s quite comfortable so I don’t mind that aspect of it, but I’m finding it a bit of a struggle to get out of in the mornings or when I need to go for a wee walk – darn middle age body, I don’t remember having this problem before!

We have our old dining suite and lounge, a little bar fridge, a couple of old rugs we were going to give away, and I’ve set up my desk in my office – and that’s about it.

Needless to say I’m longing to get all our furniture and belongings, to unpack, decorate and really settle in. It looks very bland at the moment – we wanted to create a blank canvas with neutral wall colour (it’s called “calcium” and is a very subtle grey) and carpet (in charcoal).

Hubster can’t find the charging lead for his beard trimmer, and it took me a few days to find the charger for my phone so we had to share one for a while which was a bit tricky! And, I still have to go back to the old house to do the washing … luckily it’s not too far away.

Miss Fleur seems to have taken to her new digs like a duck to water. Anybody would think she feels that this new bigger house is much more appropriate for a Princess-Diva-Puss-Kitty.

As soon as we get a contract on the other place we will be shifting all the furniture across, but I’ve gotta be honest, I doubt we’ll see one this side of Christmas. We’ve never had much luck selling our homes and it doesn’t look like it’s going to improve now. I really hate get so jealous of people who say their house sold in the first day or week! We always seem to pick the wrong time to go on the market, sigh. I’m just thankful we’re not living there so I don’t have the stress of keeping everything immaculate 24/7.

I keep seeing all these posts on social media of people putting up their Christmas trees. I don’t even know where my Christmas tree is!

So for now, yes we’re in the new house but still in limbo … dear Santa, all I want for Christmas is the other house sold for a decent price, please and thanks!

What are you asking Santa for this year?!