Making a House a Home

I've been putting off posting due to The Overwhelming Nature Of All Things.

We have our own place now—a three bedroom ground floor flat in a new barn conversion. In the end, it was really our only option after another place we applied for suddenly decided that they wouldn't take pets after all.

That said, it's a lovely place that ticked off a lot of the things on our 'want' list: a living room large enough to fit our enormous sofa, a village with a primary school and a corner shop—both very impressive—and an amazing view. We're on a hillside, with nothing but fields and valley out back, and while our garden is small, the back wall is low enough to climb on while the side walls offer some parkour opportunities!

The downsides? Well, the rent is more expensive than I was hoping and living at a brand new address poses its own problems as not everybody can find us. But the biggest issue is that there's no storage space. No loft, no garage, no cellar, no cloakroom, no broom cupboard, no linen cupboard.... Not even a utility room. We have an airing cupboard, which by default houses my laundry baskets, but it doesn't have shelves for anything else. I have an en suite shower in my room, so I'm storing the mop and bucket in there.

The first thing we did was buy and build a large shed, just so we would have extra space to put our boxes when they showed up. My father spent his anniversary building that with me, but it turned out to be a mere taster for what was to come....

A week after we left the States, a moving company came and packed up our belongings. Everything was then shipped across the Atlantic, taken through customs and finally driven down to Cornwall. They couldn't get the truck into the courtyard in front of the flats, so they drove down the field behind us, and everything was unloaded over my back wall and taken in through the patio doors.

That's when I learned that the furniture had been been disassembled.

This didn't happen when we moved to the States. It seems that the general UK policy is not to take furniture apart, while the general US policy is to disassemble and reassemble at the other end. My parents (who did the US to UK relocation ten years ago) told me that their furniture had also been taken apart, but the movers rebuilt it for them.

Nobody did any reassembling for me. The moving crew was only two people and they had their work cut out for them just unloading the container. To make matters worse, the packers hadn't provided any indication of where the hardware was. Sometimes screws were taped to the item. Sometimes... not. I picked up a towel that had been left loose rather than packed in a box, and the screws for the cat tree fell out—luckily they had 'armarkat' printed on, because there were no labels. In fact labelling was not the packers' strong suit: every box was labeled, but the labels were not indicative of everything that might be inside the box.

I complained to the shipping company which triggered a lot of arguing over whether the US or the UK side was at fault. Theoretically, it's their responsibility, so I should wait until they send somebody out to put the furniture together. Realistically, we have to live here. We need tables and shelves and beds... (Never mind the fact that I slept on a mattress on a floor for two weeks before I found the screws for my bed.)

I'm the tallest person in the family at 5'2" and the only adult. The children don't have the first clue what to do for unpacking and setting up a house. They've wanted to help, but unless I'm literally walking them through what they need to do step by step, there's precious little they can contribute. We can't even do general chores when there are boxes everywhere (and we essentially had to restock our cleaning supplies from scratch anyway.)

Therefore, for the past month, and largely singlehandedly, I've been assembling furniture without instructions, unpacking boxes into what furniture we do have, purchasing various storage solutions from Amazon, chasing down the parcels when the delivery men couldn't find our address (on three occasions, a package was dropped off at a random house in the village),  assembling those storage solutions once I found them (with instructions. Luxury!), unpacking more boxes, getting rid of things because we went from a four bedroom house to a three bedroom flat and we don't have room for everything—and basically ignoring emails, phone calls and any other forms of message because I don't have time to sort out anything else (like, um, utilities. The fairies will keep our water and electricity going, right?)



It's been overwhelming, and there were some pretty dark moments. Aside from one break for an old friend's wedding (which was lovely!), I haven't really done anything social. So much other stuff has fallen by the wayside that I do a lot of panicking that I've forgotten something vitally important. Such as the kids' school uniform which has been halfway pulled together this week. It's their first day tomorrow and they'll definitely have a complete outfit each for that, but they need more of everything and the PE kit didn't occur to me at all.

But tomorrow is also one month since we got the keys and four weeks since our things arrived... and this place does feel like a home now. The bedrooms are still a disaster, the television doesn't work because I never found the apple TV or aerial, and until I figure out how to reassemble my desk, we won't have a functional printer either... but we've gone through all the boxes and the kitchen, living room, garden and bathrooms have all taken shape. The cats have their nooks and we're finding ours...

I still feel that I can't see half of what needs doing, and that's terrifying. But I'm excited and happy to be living here. After all, the view from here is pretty damn awesome.