Tired, but happy!

Our move went succesfully, so we are now ensconced in our new home...

Or rather we are not: we basically dumped everything other than the furniture in the bedroom [particularly the bed, which we need to sleep in] all over the place and have decamped to France for a fortnight's holiday!

A few glitches, but nothing major: I couldn't sleep properly, so after 4.20am on Saturday morning that was it for me, until 4.00am on Sunday when I finally got back to sleep for the three hours I could manage until the alarm went off!

Sadly, there was two and a quarter vanload's of stuff, rather than just the two, so we had another trip back to London on Sunday morning to take the van back and pick up the car and bikes before heading straight to the Chunnel. But it all went better than I hoped [disallowing that extra round trip, obviously].

A down side: I've got yet another lot of cleaning up to do after tenants - just not my tenants this time!! The house we've moved to wasn't clean enough, so the estate agents arranged to have it cleaned on Friday. Either the cleaners let them down, or their standards of cleaning are satisfied with burnt-on grease, & handles so sticky that you want to wash your hands on the oven/hob, limescale/dirt around all the taps & just plain dirty woodwork/light switches/radiators/floors, etc... Where there isn't black mould [tiled windowsill & grout/behind downstairs loo].

Either way, for the second time in two years I've moved out of a place into a newly-"cleaned" place and it's been much filthier than the place I haven't cleaned for months! I left some of the cleaning at our London flat [given that we have to pay £250 for cleaning/carpet shampooing and window cleaning, I feel that three soy sauce rings in a cupboard and one pizza-baking residue on the oven isn't too onerous a task!], but if the tenants moved in tomorrow it would still be better than our new home that has/may have been cleaned twice.

I like to live with sparkling sanitary ware, a spotless kitchen and I vacuumed the carpets before I left. BUT, it's going to be for the last time! If our tenants don't leave the place spotless, they can pay for the £250 professionals, and when we move out of Maidstone I know that we don't have to clean to a higher standard than when we moved in, so I could get it clean to my happiness-levels now, and then do nothing exceptional for two years and it would still be a gain for the landlord!

[Note to self: make sure David (if he does the check-in) points out every item of filth and mentions that fact.]

A slightly amusing thing [hindsight; great for finding the funny!] happened to me at the nearly-23-hour stage of my day: sleep deprivation kicked in (have I mentioned the stress-induced insomnia was back?) and I lost my ability to climb stairs... I got very panicky, because my foot wasn't going on to the steps properly, and I ended up doing the last step on all fours, to avoid falling down!

Once I'd stopped, and had a glass of wine in the bath, it all seemed a lot more hilarious: grown woman forgets how to climb stairs. I promise you, I have been practising: our flat was on the fourth floor, and I've tried to climb the stairs at least once a day.

It's going to be nice to have an upstairs, and I'm going to love the little garden. I think the terrace is going to get the evening sun...

And on that note, I'm going to kick off my holiday with a celebratory glass of champagne [or two].