The Flat

This weekend, after 26 months living there, we moved out of the flat.

Adam’s first house purchase, our first DIY project, a home together and place to call our own.

It’s been a pretty wonderful place to live.

You might have seen the various posts I have written on our projects in the flat over the last 2 years – mainly working on the bathroom and the garden together.

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In our time spent there, we also completely redecorated the living room, re-purposed the second bedroom into a wardrobe space and office, and made the master bedroom our own. Many many hours of hard graft, but so satisfying now we can step back and admire our work.

We enlisted the help of various family members yesterday to shift the huge mounds of possessions Adam seemed to have accumulated. By huge, I mean, that boy owns a serious amount! Boxes from his childhood bedroom that his parents stashed into our loft once they’d moved house, enough sails and boat things to get you around the world, tools for every eventuality, I couldn’t quite believe how well we’d hidden it all! Plus that’s not taking into account the normal stuff like pots and pans and furniture and clothing.

Three choc-a-bloc moving van loads, plus quite a bit stuffed into my Dad’s estate.

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Although we spent a lot of our Christmas break packing, and then subsequently every spare minute since, I still got up at 8am yesterday morning and continued all day long. Thank goodness for families ehh, it would have been a serious struggle on our own! The entire contents of the flat, the cellar, the shed, and the loft are now stored safely opposite our new front door in our neighbour’s 16th century hayloft. The useful fact was that our new neighbour also just happens to be selling us the house!

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I’m sad to leave the flat. We’ve spent a lot of time there as a couple and it holds a huge bank of memories for us together. The flat itself has taught us what we can and cannot do (plastering!!), and how we work living together as a couple. Although it wasn’t ever legally mine, it very much always felt “our” place. There are some things we won’t miss, but the entertainment from the neighbours, walking distance to town, and close by friends made it also a really fun place to live.

It was always designed to be short term, a place to renovate together and sell for a small profit, somewhere to test our DIY hopefulness and trial living for the first time in a city. As a home, the flat served us so well, but we have now run out of things to improve, and it is time to move onto a bigger project in the country.

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