Moving House

OK - sorry we've been bad with our updates lately, but we've had to start looking for new accomodation.

Damo has started his new job too, and it's out at Stockley Park, which is out at Middlesex. On a bad day, it can take 2 hours to get to work, and the same back home.... but on a good day he can do it in 55 mins.... it's crazy. 55 mins isn't too bad for a commute time, but 2 hrs is bad.

We've finally found a place, though our house exploits have definitely not been without drama. We've been screwed over by a couple of landlords twice already, and we're not even into one of the places yet.....

But we got confirmation today that, all things going well, we'll be moving into our own place at Hammersmith on the 21st October - we are sooooooooo looking forward to getting our own place. It's all been a bit of a drama thus far, but we're reasonably happy with the place we've ended up with. We're at a place called Hammersmith Grove. It's about a 5 minute walk to Hammersmith Tube station, which is a fairly good spot for us.

We're toying with the idea of getting a car, so we're probably going to get a rental car for a week to see if it's going to be worthwhile.

Anyway, we haven't got many photos this time around, because our life for the last couple of weeks has consisted of little more than going to work, coming home from work to go flat hunting, coming home and cooking dinner, cleaning up, going to bed - rinse and repeat..... We've been teeing up appointments for every night, and also both days on weekends. If nothing else, it's been good to get out and about to check out the neighbourhoods!

It certainly hasn't been that good viewing the apartments though - we've seen some pretty dodgy places, and our budget is even reasonably fair - for £250 a week, we went to one place that looked like it should have been on a horror movie set - the bathroom was like something we'd never seen before! It was hilarious - a dude answered the door half-naked, closed the door again, asked us to wait, we're pretty sure that he went and extinguished his bong, and then came back and asked us in - the lounge room had a bed on the floor. I'm reasonably certain that we hadn't seen such a dodgy toilet and shower in our lives....

There've been all sort of different places that we've seen. Some good, some not so - but it's finally over now, thank god!!!!!!! It has been an interesting experience though - one day, we had a 6:30pm viewing at Hammersmith, and Nikki had to get from Liverpool St (the other side of London), and it was raining, cold, windy - she had no credit in her phone to ring Damo and tell him that she was running late - which wouldn't have been any good anyway because he was stuck on a tube for an hour and half on the way back from Heathrow... we still ended up making out appointment somehow!!!

The next day, was almost more or less the same, only this day it was capped off by being stood up by the Real Estate agent - they pulled a no-show. We were pretty happy, that's for sure.

It's certainly been a fairly traumatic experience, that's for sure - Damo said that he didn't have anywhere near this much stress on either of the houses that he bought, so it's odd that it's so full on just for a bloody rental place!

Anyway, unless we get screwed again, we'll be in our own place in 2 weeks time! We're having the flat warming in 3 weeks time if any of you want to come over for it.... ;-) We've even got a spare bed!

We saw Ree and Bruce and the kiddly-winks this morning on Skype - it was great to see them!!! Ryan was hilarious - when he could see Nikki on the screen he was trying to hug the screen... It was so nice to see them all. We also found out this morning that Nik's dad, Adrian, has gone and bought himself a fancy-schmancy new car with a sports kit on it - Damo asked him when they were going to go cruising for chicks - he told him that he wouldn't want to show him up now!!! :-)

It was strange today - we were walking along past Earl's Court tube station, and we heard a buzzing noise coming from a bin straight outside the tube - needless to say, we were a little concerned, so Damo mentioned something to a London Underground worker who was standing right near there, and his response was "We don't deal with that sort of thing - that's not our area - we just look after the tube" and then he left it alone. We headed off at a fairly brisk pace thinking it might be best to get out of there sooner rather than later.....

We've had a fairly domesticated day today, catching up on washing, cleaning the unit, and we've pretty much finished packing ready to get out of here when we can. We haven't given notice yet, but we've got to give 2 weeks notice, so we'll probably have a bit of overlap but it won't be too bad.

And now that we've got the unit sorted out, our next trip shouldn't be too far off either! (Thank god.......)

Anyway, we hope you're all well - we miss you all heaps and we've heard whispers that some of you might be coming over here, so we are looking soooooooooo forward to that excessively.