Moving House Would be a Lot Easier

If you move house you only  have to pack up all your belongings and transfer them to one place. You only have to deal with estate agents and solicitors. I've now lost count of the number of agents I've been dealing with recently but they include shipping agents, insurance companies [travel and landlord's insurance], holiday rentals in Taipei as we don't know where we'll be living yet, accountants, letting agents, the Taipei Reprentative Office in London, the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, and so on.

Since I last posted, as well as dealing with all these people, we've been continuing to sort through our things and get the house ready to rent out. I have to admit we aren't very house-oriented people, so there is some need for decoration to bring it up to respectable standards. For example, when I started work for the WEA four years ago, I converted our smallest bedroom to an office. That sounds more impressive than it was. I mean I stripped the pretty yellow wallpaper with animal cartoons off the walls and repapered in neutral colours. However the ceiling remained the same, bearing the scars of the inbuilt cupboards we had ripped out years before. So now finally I had to face the fact that tenants would not tolerate staring a ceiling that only had paper and coving across four-fifths of it, and redo the ceiling too........I am never, ever, ever going to paper and paint a ceiling ever, ever again. If you know me, please remind me of this fact every time you see me. That's all. I don't want to talk about it.

The shipping company are coming on Monday to take Conrad's piano and anything else we want to ship to Taiwan. So now it is crunch time and we really have to decide what goes and what doesn't. No doubt there will be things we miss and try to cram into suitcase in a week's time, but for this weekend we're really going to concentrate on going through our things and packing up the essentials. I'm lucky to have a friend in Hong Kong who has given me some tips on what is expensive or difficult to buy.  I know we'll be packing up Conrad's books and some kitchen equipment, and filling the spaces with things like sunscreen, but we're still undecided on some things and it seems every thing we encounter now sparks a 'shall we send this to Taiwan?' conversation.

So, basically, things progress apace. I am making sure to eat lots  of bacon and roast dinners. I probably won't eat enough to stop me missing them, but there's no harm in trying.