A very tired British Woman, reporting from her country home!!!!

Well, first I am having internet issues, and so it could be very hitty-missy with my blogging.

So, where do I start with this moving lark. We closed on the `new`house on Tuesday and we picked up the keys late Tuesday afternoon, so we had an early supper and we were up at the house by 5:30pm.

What greeted us however was a nightmare. The place was filthy, and I mean pig dirty filthy. When God was handing out cleaning skills, the people who owned this house were in a far away place. My goal for Tuesday night was to clean out the fridge. That took me two hours to do that, as it was black inside. The stove was so dirty that dh took pity on me and said we are buying a new one, as there is no way he was using that stove. So that was all I got done on Tuesday night. It was also a night of discoveries, as it turns out they `hid` a lot of things. An example is that one mud room door is siliconed shut, so we can`t use it at all. The other one is so hard to shut and lock it`s so hard on me. Dh went to close the downstairs patio door, only to find he had the door handle and part of the frame in his hands, and on and on it went.

Wednesday, we were up there bright and early and I set about cleaning the upstairs. They had a couple of dogs with short hair and there was dog hair everywhere. I don`t think she had ever cleaned the windows, and there were so many dead flies I could have made a couple of dead fly pies with them. The window panes were black, the walls are filthy. The toilets were icky, but by 4:30pm Wednesday, I had managed to clean one layer of dirt off the upstairs so we could move our stuff in there.

Meanwhile, dh spent to day cleaning the garage and the basement. Now in our contract we had specified that they had to get rid of two old fridges, an old oil tank and the rest of the garbage off the property. Well they did get rid of the fridges and the oil tank, but left the rest of the garbage. We are going to have to hire a skip, to haul all the garbage away at a cost of $200 for the week, and $80 a tonne thereafter. Lets just say Dh is not a happy camper at this point. Plus in years gone by, they must have collected the rain water and stored it in a concrete tank, which we call the pit. The ceiling height on the basement is probably only six feet (in the old basement), so this `pit`is probably 4 feet tall, and what they did was throw all there construction garbage in that, so dh is really ticked about that.

Anyhow, we go home, as dh and my dad have to go and pick up a truck at U-Haul for Thursday`s moving. Thursday, my dad and dh move all the stuff from the garage, basement and shed to the new house, as we had hoped to save time and money by doing that. While I cleaned out the kitchen cupboards, which of course were filthy. It took me all day to do that, plus wash floors.

Friday the movers were here by 7:30am and had moved us and unpacked the truck and left by 12:30pm. They did drop one box, and smashed a couple of dishes, but it wasn`t anything too important thank goodness. We spent the rest of the afternoon unpacking and setting up the bedrooms, so at least we could have a place to sleep. Now I did pick up the mail that morning and it was all bills for the prior people, plus some flyer's for a couple of local stores. One of the deals was a trailer for the lawn tractor, which was on a two day special for $99.99. We had just picked one up earlier in the week on sale for $170, so we popped out that night to have something to eat and pick up the trailer.

Saturday, I did get the dresser in the kitchen washed and polished, but in between hands the Bell Internet guy turned up to install the internet, which of course wouldn`t work. Then the satellite guy turned up to install that, which actually worked. My dad and step-mother came and my dad set to work doing some bits and bobs of jobs for us which was a super help.

After lunch me and my stepmother went shopping, and to pick up a 3GB Internet stick with USB connection, in the hopes we could get internet this way. The kids arrived, and we bbq-ed, and everyone left around 7:30pm.

Sunday ds left just before lunch time, and me and dh went out in the afternoon to pick up a stove and a couple of other things that we needed.

We are so tired me and dh its not even funny. We ache in places we didn`t know even existed. There are so many jobs to do on this house that we weren`t aware of, its just plain overwhelming and goodness knows where we are going to get the money from to do it all.

HOWEVER, as I am sitting here on Sunday night, its peace and quiet, I am looking over the countryside and it`s just lovely. It feels as though we are taking one step forward and ten back at the moment, but it is coming together slowly but surely. I know in a couple of weeks time the place will look different again, and each day it looks more like home.

I will say the people in the local town (a ten minute drive away) are super nice and extra friendly and helpful. We had a neighbour pop by on Thursday to say hello, someone else called in on Friday and someone else on Saturday. It`s a big adjustment on our system, going from a city to the countryside, but I think, no I know we won`t regret it.

I will fill you in on everything else over the next few days, on all the other going`s on.

I just wanted to add, one of you questions is, why don`t we go after the people who owned the house for all the issues that they hid and for not taking all their garbage away. Well the lawyer told us they owned nearly $7,000 on their property taxes. The woman who lived here had a different name to the guy, and she was telling me she wasn`t paying Canada Post to forward their mail. On Friday there were three bills in her name, that I have had to put moved, return to sender, as she obviously hasn`t given them her new address!! We think they had money problems, so it would probably be more aggravation than enough trying to get money out of them!