We have moved. To a different county even. It's only half an hour further south but it feels much more country. Bigger house. Nicer garden (tended by others). A good thing.

The move itself was relatively painless. For eight hundred and thirty Euro, three guys came with cardboard boxes, wrapped and packed everything and drove it in a truck to the other house where they carried everything into the designated rooms. I'm sure that if stuff had been damaged in the move, we might have discovered that insurance was an optional extra, but that didn't happen. So here we are.

Of course the house wasn't ready for us. Sally's parents (the previous tenants) had only taken with them what they needed. The previous weekend we had designated one room The Crap They Have To Deal With room and moved as much of their stuff into it as we could in the time available. Another room was designated The Crap We Have To Deal With room and most of the stuff that came off the truck went in there.

Over the next few days we survived without a cooker and only the fridge space that we could scrounge from Sally's mum. We set up in two bedrooms and a living room and proceeded to prepare the master bedroom for occupation. In the course of this operation we came across my in-laws' stash of sex toys and soft pr0n novels. This is the sort of thing a son-in-law should never have to see and it violated a cardinal rule of moving house -- hide the pr0n! (The night before we moved, when most things were boxed up in preparation for the next day, I could hear, in the late night quiet, a whirring noise. I tracked down the box in question (which was fortunately near the top of the pile) and opened it to discover something, er, vibrating. I turned it off and removed the batteries.)

We then attacked the kitchen and basically ripped out all the units. Prior to all this I had admired the MIL's ability to do the DIY thing -- plumbing, electrics, carpentry -- but none of it stood up to close inspection. It was all (reasonably) functional but usually ugly and in the case of the electrics, it gave me the heebie jeebies. I'm surprised the house didn't burn down long ago. Granted I'm a bit of a nervous nellie when it comes to the auld 220v, but this did seem to be a bit risky. And bizarre.

At one point I was taking down a plasterboard partition (a very satisfying task involving lots of hammering and kicking) which had wires going in all directions and it took a good while to work out where they were going and why. It was not uncommon for a fitting to be attached to a flex that disappeared through a wall to be plugged in somewhere on the other side of the house. I was especially nervous about things that seemed not live as you couldn't be certain if they would stay that way.

Anyway. I'm still here and we have a cooker and more fridge space. Sally picked some stuff up at an auction that will go nicely in the kitchen (*whispered* and we are going to Italy in September).

So despite the fact that we're kinda broke and it's the worst summer for ten years and work is getting a bit tense, I don't feel down about it. I'm looking forward to painting our room and maybe getting a new carpet for it and finding the right place for the cooker and plumbing in the dishwasher and fixing the leaky taps and so on and so forth.

I'm turning into a DIY geek.