Moving South

It took us 1.5 days to pack, load, move, unload and unpack our belongings into the new apartment in Vauxhall. I’ve never done any sort of move like that before and it was literally a painful experience. It is not fun living on the 5th floor of an apartment and you are required to move. Firstly you need to load your items into the lift and then unload them at the bottom of the lift and then you need to load it into the van. Repeating this 100 times is ridiculous!

There should be a company who operates some sort of conveyer belt service that latches on to your balcony frame or window and then you load your items on to this belt which slowly brings the items down to terra firma and straight into the van. In Amsterdam most homes use a pulley system to bring items from the ground on to the appropriate floor. If you pay attention, you will see homes with a hook/pulley at the very top of the house.

Now if you weren’t sore from loading things into the van then you should be a full time removalist. Its twice the work unloading the items from an underground car-park, then taking a lift, then walking a short distance to another building, then juggling 3 IKEA bags of stuff while trying to open the double door with a fob, then taking another lift to your floor before unloading that batch and repeating the process another 20 times.

I couldn’t feel my arms the next day and my back wasn’t in the best shape either but now the move is complete and I’m in a new place closer to civilization, it was worth the trouble. Albeit a few things going wrong the first week like the no hot water issue, washing machine tripping the power, door handles coming off and curtain rails coming off the wall but everything else has been sweet. Might I add that the first 3 of these things managed to be solved using Google and some DIY knowledge so it hasn’t been too bad.

The apartments itself especially the penthouses are quite luxurious. You would be paying at least £2000-£3000 per week for your humble abode. The underground car park is simply a car show parading really expensive cars. Instead of finding the best looking or most expensive car, it was harder to find the shit car parked between the white lines. There were Ferrari’s still covered with their emblem covers, Bentley’s, Lamborghinis, and the list goes on.

Unfortunately I do not own any of these vehicles. An annual car park permit is around £2000, that’s almost the price of the council tax here. Rumor has it that JK from Jamiroquai has 6 personal car park spaces housing his expensive cars. The agent did say he lives many floors above us, probably in the penthouse.

It’s only been a week living here and I still need to buy more odds and ends for my room. IKEA was good for a few things but now I’ve simply fallen into the shopping abyss of Amazon. It has everything I need and its many times cheaper then several stores out there. The best thing by far is that it is delivered to the concierge where I can pick up the items on the way home from work. Who said it wasn’t going to be easy?

smiles