A house move is said to be one of the most stressful things you can go through. I think I managed to forget this fact.

It took well over a week thanks to having far too much stuff, though we’re in now! Things are slowly making their way into the place they’ll belong.

It is stressful, exciting, tiring, exhausting and so much more. Insomnia reared its ugly head again, reminding me what it was like to have too much going on in your head. I’ll do a bigger post very soon, but being a practically minded kind of person, it’s important to get things in place before you move, such as insurance. In 2003 we took out Life Insurance. Because of this existing policy, our new cover didn’t need to be quite as high, plus we got a discount. This is fortunate, as a 2003 premium is way better than a 2018 one. Because of my age our overall mortgage term has reduced to 21 years, rather than the standard 25. Fortunately there’s plenty of choice out there which cover older people, so it wasn’t difficult to find what we needed. Now we’re having to look into our contents insurance. Our premiums have jumped, possibly due to this postcode being a new build. The bonus is that we’re in Shared Ownership so don’t have to take out buildings insurance – our housing association covers that. The next things we’re looking at are policies which protect our mortgage payments should we lose our jobs. We also need to make a will. I believe November is the month to do that. I feel quite grown up about the whole thing, while still in a bubble about it all happening. It happened so quickly…

The main thing is we now own part of a house, nobody is going to put it up for sale and we can stay here as long as we want to without the fear of something going wrong.

If something does go wrong, our insurance has to cover it. I think that’s a fairly simple way of looking at things? After all, if this is the place we spend the rest of our lives, it makes sense to have everything looked after so we can just live here rather than worry about everything. When it came to the house move itself, we saved quite a lot of money doing it ourselves. We hired a van for three days, which cost us around £90. A few days later we hired a smaller van to take the rest of our belongings to the local civic amenity site at around £30. I used the Anyvan service to have two men move our largest things which ended up being our two settees and our bed which cost around £130. I think next time I consider a house move I’ll pay someone else to do the packing, though there was a lot of KonMari-ing and some severe Swedish Death Cleaning going on. But our shelves are looking a lot better now, and we have books that bring us joy. There are also still shelves in the hallway, but hey, they might be gone in a week…

Then there’s the property we left. Our contract says we have to make sure everything is clean and how we found it. Shaun has done a lot of painting and we’ve borrowed next door’s Vax machine which should do the trick. If not, there’s always the chance to hire a Rug Doctor. I’ll be glad when this is all over. Moving house is not my idea of fun, and especially not over the summer holidays! I’d much rather have a holiday instead – especially with this weather we’ve had.