Moving House Madness

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I was doing a survey today which was asking questions on how I coped when I moved house and whether I had any problems. It's over 20 years since Adam and I moved to our current house and we've had 20 very happy and peaceful years but thinking back, our move was a bit of a disaster. We were well prepared. We'd decided to put our previous home which was in the city of Norwich on the market during the summer of 1998 but had the foresight to pack a lot of our stuff away into boxes and store it in our garage so we'd have less to worry about when we sold it. We eventually got a buyer in October 1998 and had already found the house we wanted here in Spixworth and put in an offer. We had a mortgage arranged, the house we were moving into was empty and our buyer was a first time buyer. We seemed all set; everything was lined up for 27th November. A couple of weeks before we were due to move we'd got permission to put a large water tank in the back garden of the Spixworth house and spent several hours out in the cold November weather in Norwich trying to catch our fish in our old pond and transfer them over to the new house. That all went well. On the day we moved the removal men turned up in good time and soon loaded all our boxes into their van. We then telephoned our solicitor (who was a friend of mine) and just checked everything was OK. She said that as far as she was concerned everything was fine so we sent the removal van over to our new house at about 10.00 that morning and we sat in an empty house with our two cats waiting for our solicitor to ring so that we could go and collect the keys to our new house from the estate agent. Our solicitor phoned through at about 1.00 pm and told us that she had good news and bad news. The good news was that our purchaser's money had come through. The bad news was that the money for our Spixworth house hadn't. She'd phoned our building society to find out what had happened and apparently their system had crashed. Our solicitor said that, if the money hadn't come through by 3.00 pm she'd guarantee it. If she hadn't been a friend we could have been left homeless. The girl who was moving into our Norwich property had paid but the money to pay for our new house hadn't. Our solicitor phoned just after 3.00 and said the money had just arrived so we could now move house so we loaded the cats into their baskets and then had to call in at the estate agents we were buying from and collect the keys to our new house and then travel to our estate agents to drop off the keys from our old house. It was dark by the time we reached Spixworth and our poor removal men had been hanging around there all day. Being a relatively small village there was absolutely nowhere for them to go while they were waiting Back in 1998 we didn't have mobile phones so couldn't contact them to let them know what was happening. Thankfully they saw the funny side and soon had all our gear set up in our new house. We gave them a tenner to get themselves a pint and shut ourselves in our new house. It was then that we discovered the heating wasn't working. As you can imagine, the end of November in England isn't great so we set up our TV, made a cuppa and ordered a takeaway and huddled up under a blanket. By 8.00 pm it was so cold that we decided to go to bed. Even the cats curled up between us. Despite all of this, we've had 20 very happy years here and I can't imagine ever wanting to live anywhere else and, to be honest, my last experience of moving house doesn't lend itself to any thoughts of moving.