Mega Giant House Move Update
July 13th, 2007 | Filed under Personal, Photography.
I got sidetracked by being overcome by boxes and having no phoneline for a few weeks, so here’s what’s been happening…
I hired a van from the 25th to the 27th of June which was, coincidentally, the same time that the weather thought it’d be really fun to rain constantly. The 25th was spent mostly sat in the van on either the M62 or in a mega giant queue leading down to my house. Only I wasn’t allowed to drive to my house as the road was shut. The slightly irritated policeman told me to turn around and find some other way to my house. I had to make a five mile detour just to get around a roadblock 50 metres from my house. There was another block the other end of the road too, but I ignored that one.
Thankyou people who helped me move house, I think I’d still be doing it now otherwise 
The rest of that week was spent using the van to take my old house and move it into my new house. It took forever as I’d not packed everything into boxes, mistakenly believing that it would be quick to move things. Ha! no, it’s not… I did two van trips and four car journeys before the house was empty. I left behind a washing machine and a wardrobe.
On the 29th I went to a conference set up by the school I’ll be working at. They gave me a laptop They gave me a laptop that was severely locked down to the point where I had to become quite creative at connecting to my local network.
The following week was spent unpacking boxes. So many boxes… if it takes two weeks to pack, it takes three to unpack - especially when you have a large kitchen, but no storage in it. I do have a mysterious dungeonlike place under the stairs though. Most of my stuff is now neatly packed away or piled in corners. I went to the recycling centre (tip) yesterday to get rid of a ton of shit left from when this house was done up before I moved in - the builders had filled the bins with wire and pipes and then left two bags of rotting rubbish outside too. That smelled great when I tried to move it and ants came out the bag.
BT turned up a week later to install my phoneline, which was nice. My laptop denied having a modem in it though, and wanted to connect to the Internet to find drivers. I resorted to visiting my cousin and letting my laptop talk to the Internet there. Once back at home it was all happy again and I could use awful dialup to go on the Internet… only I couldn’t as I didn’t have a new ISP yet!
Using the phone and my dad I signed up to Be Internet, plugged their dialup details into my laptop and reconnected with the world. Be made my Internet work on Monday, I’ll write about that separately.
So yeah, in the past three weeks I’ve managed to move house and it’s great. I do not have people living above me, the ones at the sides are normal, nice people who talk to me. I have a garden, somewhere to put my car and windows in every room. Of course there is random damp patches on some of the walls and under the kitchen floor there is a small lake, but I’ve taken that to be normal now. I like the view out my windows at the back, it’s a field, some trees and a little hill. The hill is really a rubbish dump, but they seem to be covering it over with soil gradually. I looked on Google Maps and it stretches quite far. The local council should really get more intune with recycling, I have a green bin for normal rubbish (err what?) and a brown bin for cardboard and paper only. I can take tins, glass and plastic bottles to Sainsbury’s but nobody seems that interested in plastic meat trays or sodding plastic bags.
I took millions of photos while moving, but since I’ve stolen the RAM out of my server I have nowhere to put them. Some have been uploaded to my Flickr account though and they’re what you’re currently looking at.
When I finally get the RAM I ordered off eBay I’m going to set up Apache on my server, allow incoming connections and turn it into a webserver. Once that has been done I can use it to store all my photos and selectively put some of the nicer ones on my piku.co.uk gallery. It’s quite a bit of hassle getting photos online, I want a nice and simple method that doesn’t require farting around with lo
ng and error-prone HTTP uploads.
My house came without a fridge or washing machine so I’ve had to buy both of those. The fridge came three days after moving in, and my washer is due to arrive tomorrow. This is good since I’m running out of clothing and my bedding could do with a wash. The best part is the house has a normal electricity meter - no more walking to the local shop to buy tokens - good job since the local shop is a Post Office five minutes down the road, or the middle of town.
Click on any of the images to view my Flickr photostream.
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