The Unpacking

I would think it took me 3 months to fully unpack and that’s not counting the 15 or so boxes of kitchen stuff in the shed to this day. This house was renovated as a holiday house and not much thought was given to storage. There is no where to put a mop, a bucket or a vacuum cleaner and the sparkling-shiny-white-newly-installed and almost never-used kitchen from Cedarwood is useless for me and it doesn’t suit the house. It needs to be changed but it’s on the very long list.

Plus the kitchen was as dark as a dungeon. Me who lives for sunlight and cooking had managed to buy a house with the most depressing kitchen on the planet. The whole west facing wall was solid, not even a small pane of glass in the back door. The kitchen window was north facing and they had managed to put in the smallest window possible. I hated being in it. One of the first things I did was get onto Munster Joinery to come and replace the entire panel in the back door with glass. The difference that made was unreal.

But back to the unpacking. There is no hot press – none, nada, zilch. To those of you that don’t understand this particularly Irish term – it’s an airing cupboard. Where in the name of all that’s holy was I going to store sheets, towels and bedding? At the top of the stairs is a small door leading into the attic. I threw the boxes of stuff in there. In winter it is Baltic, in summer (now) it’s hot enough to boil the few bottles of wine left over from various booze cruises.

Apart from the unpacking the trying to find stuff has to be the most frustrating. You remember you’ve seen that item somewhere, but where? And then the stuff they have lost. I was there most of the time they were packing up. I saw them labelling boxes. So where has it gone? How can stuff just vanish? The trifle bowl was the most frustrating, that and the pasta maker. It’s not like I use them often but I needed the trifle bowl for the annual family Christmas dinner (after Christmas Day) we take turns hosting and after a glass of wine one night I decided it would be a brilliant idea to invite them all here…….I knew they were both in the same cupboard in the kitchen in the previous place, still in their boxes. I hunted everywhere and ended up buying a new trifle bowl on Amazon that just made the final delivery day before Christmas. A couple of months later I drove back up to the old house to get some last bits and pieces and I went into a really depressing cold, empty shell and looked in the cupboard. There they were in at the back on the bottom shelf.

I had decided I would stay in my new house that night and the next and then drive back to Meath to organise moving the animals. I was worried about the sow, Lady Lavinia who had never set foot in a trailer in her life and was very clever and very, very suspicious of them. All the times I had loaded up her offspring she had never been temped up the ramp for food. I knew Honky and Parker (my accidental pet pigs) would be fine as they had both been in trailers before and would do anything for food.

I also had sleepless nights over the cats. I have one old cat who we named the fat cat or Fat Kitty. He’s the most nervy odd cat in the history of odd cats. You can’t just bend down and scoop him up when he’s outside but you can when he is in the house. I had to leave him and my daughter’s cat (who I inherited when she went off on her world tour) behind with the pigs. I knew I had to capture them both the night before the move so I could put them in cat boxes on the day of the move.

I didn’t realise how freaked they would be at the empty house that I left them in the night before while I went and stayed with my son again. On the plus side the pigs were happy to see me back as they always were after I’d been away.

Tomorrow was another day and I was still tired and weak from the tummy bug.