Moving day and early day lessons

So we packed up our lives into a zipvan and spent the day moving our stuff into the new place. Turns out a zipvan can hold quite a lot.

Lessons learned

We learned a number of lessons from this experience:

  1. You should hire the zipvan for longer than you expect to need it and even more so if the weather is bad. We spent far more of the day stuck in traffic trying to get to the new house, rather than loading and unloading the van and towards the end of the rental period this started to get quite stressful.
  2. If you’re buying a former rented out property, be aware that it’s likely that nothing works. Bring an electric radiator (or two). We moved in during February, the boiler gave up shortly after and the gas wasn’t connected properly which took weeks to resolve.
  3. If you’ve built any conditions into the sale e.g. the seller must clear the garden, understairs and loft before you exchange, go back and check shortly before completion! Because we were told it had happened and it hadn’t and there was a pile of crap both under the stairs and in the loft which was not fun to move when we eventually started renovation works. Imagine suitcases and all sorts covered in 30 years + of dust and grime being dropped out of the loft and carried through the house..

 

The house

Moving into a former HMO we knew it would be grim but it was really grim and the house had been seriously neglected. The flat roof out back from an extension at some point is not watertight so we have leaks both in both the ground floor kitchen and bathroom (one has a tray under it and the other one luckily drips directly into the sink so we ignore it).

The double glazing was broken in a number of windows and turns out one of the locking mechanisms on one of the windows had never worked. Chris went to unlock the window and it pushed open without turning the handle. He investigated and concluded it had never in fact locked properly since installation. 

The uPVC windows were clearly cheap and poorly fitted meaning they were breezy around the edges. This wasn’t ideal especially when the boiler can’t handle heating the house either.

The carpet was insulated with newspaper from 1980. We know this because it says so.

 

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