Whilst Emma started work downstairs on making some kind of sense to the ridiculously small kitchen (I swear its smaller than my old one with three times as many bedrooms?!!), I take my screwdriver, hammer and (at times) brute force to the shelf units and wardrobes of the bedroom. In fairness I do leave the ones down the back wall, but all the others are soon gone, leaving behind them a lovely purple wall – purple? Purple with a pink carpet? What on earth?!

By the end of the day we have a significant number of boxes unpacked, flattened and consigned to either loft or attic and its already looking much more like a home. We head off to M&S Simply Food store at Junction 10 to get a ‘healthy’ take away of salad, bring it back home and settle down to watch the new series of Merlin (really not that sure about it, but its good, brainless Saturday evening fair…).

We got the call from our solicitor early on that our money had gone through and that the next people we’d hear from were the estate agents but it took longer for the house we’re buying to go through. Despite the amount of stuff, the men had everything packed and loaded onto the back of the aging lorry buy lunchtime. We were left, in sunny weather to sit in my empty house. Emma went to get some lunch from our local Tesco and I gave my house a last look round, taking photos of my first house. We ate lunch on the lounge floor and we got the call that Alexanders had our keys ready for collection. Suddenly it was time to lock the doors on Cypress Gardens for the last time, and yes, I was emotional about it. I’m excited about moving on, but this house has been mine, been special, been good to me for seven and a half of years. It’s difficult.

By the time that I got back with the keys the John Lewis man had been and delivered our 76 kilos of new mattress to the new house, and Em and I entered. Within hours we were all in, and fast realising that having been packed we had absolutely no clue where anything was packed. It seems both sensible and ridiculous for movers to label boxes according to what room they came from but when you come from a 1-bed house and into a 3-bed house there are going to be things that don’t go back into the room whence they come.

I manage to assemble our new bed though – gloriously oak, it is beautiful. And the mattress, for all its 76 kilos, it’s luxuriously comfortable and Vi-sprung. Nice!

We do some unpacking – enough to get about – before going round to Dominos Pizza to get dinner in, where we also go in the new Polish shop next door and buy some very nice Polish lime-ade with which to wash down our pizza…

Packing up Emma’s didn’t take long as it was already boxed but when we came to leave we discovered too late that we couldn’t get back round the motorway junction because of the same overturned lorry as earlier that had previously delayed us and we had to make our way home, in convoy, via a slightly roundabout route through Slough [sl-uff], getting back to my ‘ickle ‘ouse about lunch time.

In the afternoon our removal man came back to the house and started packing up my house and boy was he quick – I put a screwdriver down on the table for a moment and the next thing I knew it was at the bottom of a box – but boy did he chat a lot. Emma escaped the mayhem for a while to go and visit William at the vets, and by the time the evening came we were all shattered and only most of the ground floor packed.

Dinner was courtesy of the Market Square Fish Bar – and we brought it home and sat amongst boxes and watched tele for having an early night – a last night for me in my house. Tomorrow is going to be another busy day.

After the incessant rains of the last – umm – month or more, the was shining and it was warm but not uncomfortably hot, and dry, and in a way, perfect moving