Tag Archives: moving house

Moving our lives

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Well, we sure have been busy. There has been substantial progress Phase 1 of our project. We finally finished Roger’s bungalow, down to the silicone sealant around the shower tray. And for the last three weeks, we have been moving two households between three houses by means of the Land Rover and a 3m long trailer. We had a deadline to meet as well, as the new tenants are moving into the house in Harrow today.

Finishing ‘the bung’ took so much longer than we had hoped. We missed all the deadlines that we ever tried to put on it. But finally, by the end of February, the last lick of paint was on and it was ready for Roger to move into.

Loading the trailer in the rain

And he has. Several trips with the Tardis and trailer moved all the furniture he needs, and 80 years of possessions and memories packed away in boxes. He is now having a happy time settling in and sorting out.

Meanwhile, Alex and Hilde have so far taken 5 trips up and down the M40 to go and fetch their own lifetime of belongings. Several boxes had already made it to Westacre, but much more had to be fetched, including all our furniture. We worked non stop for two weeks packing, carrying, loading and unloading. For the heaviest items we had help from our friend Matt, and we couldn’t have done it without him.

Less than two weeks ago, we heard that tenants had been found for us, and that they wanted to move in today, 16th March. This made our time scale a litter tighter than we had hoped. As well as all the packing and moving, we spent a day giving our empty house a once-over with fresh paint. It has been professionally cleaned and looks sparkling. Hopefully our tenants will like living there.

Today, Alex and Hilde are having a little break, and are nesting at Westacre. Alex is setting up the new telephone system, and Hilde feels the need to clean things. But we will also have time to just sit around doing not much, and for dinner with friends this evening.

Next on the list is making our bedsit in the big living room, but we’re optimistic about how much space there is. We hope to make it into four separate areas: a bedroom, a living room, a kitchen and a little office corner.

We finally are the occupiers as well as the owners of Westacre. It’s been a long haul. Now the real adventure can begin.

Westacre Phase 1 – Settling in

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We have great plans for Westacre.

The house will be getting a complete makeover. We intend to make it as energy efficient as we can. This will involve lots of insulation and a new heating and hot water system based around a wood burner.

As the years go by, our garden will provide more of our food. Slowly but surely, a mostly ornamental garden will turn into a productive permaculture system, incorporating the fruit trees of the orchard the house was built in.

We would like to share all of this with you. You can follow our adventure online, and soon you will be able to get involved in more practical ways as well.

 

The first phase of the project revolves around settling people into their new homes:

– Roger into his bungalow.
– Alex and Hilde into one room at Westacre.
– new tenants in the house in Harrow.

This is less straightforward than it sounds. We’ve basically got our own little property chain here, and nothing will move unless we make it. The process will involve the following six steps,not necessarily in order:

1) Finish renovating the bungalow

Roger’s bungalow

We had hoped that Roger would be able to move before Christmas. Clearly, this is not the case, and there is still a lot of work to do. We are in the decorating phase now, so hopefully it won’t be too long into the New Year before this renovation is complete.

2) Move Roger’s furniture and belongings into the bungalow
With the Tardis (our Land Rover Defender – it’s a big blue box and it growls) and the big trailer, we should be able to do this ourselves. The greatest difficulty will be for Roger to decide what to take and what to leave behind in the big house. Downsizing isn’t easy.

3) Find new homes for things that are no longer wanted
Thankfully, we have our friend Eva to help with that. She used to do logistics for MSF, so if anyone can move stuff, she can. There will be a number of items from Westacre and Harrow that will be looking for a new home. We will see how much we can sell and give away.

4) Turning the Westacre living room into a bedsit
We will be living at Westacre while we’re doing the renovation. We need to set up one part of the house so that we can live relatively undisturbed by the building work. Westacre’s current living room is ideal for that. It is large, and already has a toilet and shower just next to it. We will also plumb in a sink and put in a cooker. It will be our little refuge for the first year.

5) Move Alex and Hilde’s furniture and belongings from Harrow to Westacre
This process is already on the way. Every time we travel between Harrow and Westacre, several boxes of our possessions come along with us. They are being stacked in an unused room for now. We hope that the Tardis will be man enough for the main move. We envisage a whole week of driving up and down the M40, loading and unloading, and doing a bit of DIY while we’re not driving.

6) Let the house in Harrow
Again, we have done some of this already. The garden has had its winter tidying done and new double glazing has been installed. We still need to do a few paint jobs in there, and a thorough cleaning job, before any tenants can move in.

Once the bulk of that is done, we can move on to Phase 2: insulation. That’s where it gets interesting.

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How to get our latest news:
– On the Westacre web site, you can read weekly articles about what we are doing and why. Hilde’s weekly blog of her spiritual journey is also published there.
– On Westacre’s Facebook page, daily highlights will be published.
– On Twitter, you can find a blow by blow account of what is going on. We hope to tweet several times a day.