Moving

I've spent the past 9 days in London, helping out my mum, feeding the cat, enjoying the sun and packing. Why is it that packing always leaves me with horrid bruises on my forearms?

Just before we started to move things from our storage compartment in London, my bf suggested I take pictures of the process. He was half joking, but I wish I had now, I would have loved to show our amazing packing skills and would have made for a pretty boastful post.

But alas I did not.

The most important points in the moving/packing process went like this...

• fitting a 150cm wide matress into a 154cm wide van where the door space was only 147cm wide.
• Said mattress was too tall to stand up in the van, so we had to pack a bunch of boxes (which were rearranged by me twice to use the space most efficiently) and then lay the mattress ontop of them.
• Then realising we needed to fit more boxes in underneath we had to suspend the mattress as best we could from the ceiling of the van and slot more, very heavy boxes in underneath.
• This also involved propping said mattress up with shoulders and/or heads while manouvering/shoving boxes into any space available.
• We then had to squish the bedframe in between the mattress and the ceiling of the van. This was not easy either and involved 3 people pushing, pulling, squishing and swearing for at least 10 minutes until the miracle was performed.
• Me using the side door and previously redundant space to fit in any slimmer items like folding chairs and clothes drying racks, so the van looked like a twisted game of tetris crossed with a bizarre and difficult jigsaw puzzle.
• Realising we hadn't packed the breakfast table, tv, pc, shelves and tank for the snake and having to shove them in at the back willy nilly.
• THEN realising we still had 20 4-packs of baked beans and 4 bottles of sauce to shove in somewhere. These too got shoved in at the back wherever possible and led to almost crushed toes when opening the back doors of the van.
• A last minute scramble in the morning trying to pack the snake's tank in somewhere because it was too big for the spare seat at the front of the van.
• Accepting that we'd have to leave behind our amazing selection of cocktail liquors, my white boxes full of random crafting bits and a box randomly packed last september which just happened to contain my FAVOURITE mug.
• A final sigh of relief as the bf and his brother drove off to Dover to catch the ferry.

I am pretty proud of how much we managed to fit into that van. If either me or the bf had ever seen the inside of a renault trafic, I'm sure we would have pleaded for a master, but seeing as we got the van for free, we didn't complain too much. Although there was a LOT of swearing on Wednesday.

The tightly packed van is currently in France but shall be arriving in Italy this afternoon.

I'm sure I don't have to tell you how much I'm dreading unpacking the darn thing.