Time to Move... Again

We discovered this time and time again when we were landscaping our second house (particularly with the pavers that we ended up paving the area outside the laundry with), that it's virtually impossible to plan so effectively that you never have to 'double dip', so to speak. For example, we must have moved those pavers outside the laundry at least six times from various places in the yard, since they kept getting in the way of whatever we wanted to do next.

We hoped to avoid this doubling and tripling of effort at our new house as much as possible by downsizing our furniture and keeping as little stuff in the house as possible (poor mum has the second half of her garage full of boxes of our not-so-essential-immediately stuff).

But inevitably, even a small amount of worldly posessions takes up some space.

We decided in the last week or so that before we move back into the house we should really sand, re-stain and re-polish the floors, since they're not in the best condition. I'm not a fan of the orange-ey colour that Allie is embracing here:

In preparation for painting the master bedroom, we pulled everything out of that room and piled it all into the second bedroom (Daniel's room). Because of our decision to sand the floors though, that now had to change. So, yesterday morning before work, Tom and I picked everything up and piled it all into the third bedroom (which is the room that will become the bathroom). Obviously when we get to the point of tiling that room we'll have to shift everything again, but we'll just have to embrace the inevitable doubling-up.

First we laid out a layer of all of the packages of tiles that were sitting in random piles all over the house, as a kind of raised floor.

And then we piled everything in. When I was a little girl (continuing to this day), I LOVED jigsaw puzzles. I even insisted that my mother frame a jigsaw puzzle that was made up entirely of baked beans, like this:

sourced from Andrew McMillen

Why on earth is this relevant? Because man oh man are those jigsaw puzzling skills coming in handy! I am a pro at fitting as many things as possible into a small space, I tell you! So there you have it kids, do jigsaw puzzles, and you'll be really great at packing boxes and storage sheds. Incentive, I wonder?

So here's the third bedroom in its almost-entirely-full state. Don't worry, I added more things to fill the rest of the gaps after this.

Looks a bit different from this only a week or two ago, huh?

And this is how it will stay until we get our floors sanded and stained, at which time we'll have to move everything out again. We need mattresses to sleep on once we finally move back in, won't we? And then the bathroom will become a major priority. You haven't even seen the horrible existing bathroom yet, have you? I'll have to take you on a tour of the house in its current state soon.

The rest of our junk is going into the enclosed sleepout (which we will eventually separate into an office and an open verandah.

With plenty of room still left for the rest of our larger bits and pieces...

...that still remain in the main living area, such as those couches. If you look hard at this photo, you can see the piano wedged in the top left near the fancy window. That area will become the ensuite eventually, meaning that we don't need to sand its floor because it will be tiled. Oh and please forgive the horribly muddy state of this floor. It's impossible to keep it clean when the entire block is covered in mud and we have no running water to the house.

So the next big thing will be the floor sanding, which we're all geared up to attempt this weekend. It's going to be a verrrry interesting weekend. But what's new, eh?