Rolling the clock back to last Sunday though, I did a little more packing and decided that although I'd said I was going to have the Monday off from work, I needed to go into work to scan the two applications I wanted to send off for apartments.
Essentially I stuck around work until about 1pm and almost everything I did was related to either applying for apartments or looking for new ones.
A definite case of soz/not soz to be honest.
Then I had two additional places I wanted to look at on Monday afternoon... before I headed off to the first one though, the agent for one of the Saturday places called me to check something on my application and to say that she was pretty sure it was going to be accepted.
You would think that would be great news, right?
Except I couldn't remember if it had an airconditioner, and neither the photos nor the text description mentioned it. What I should have done was call her back right away and ask.
That's not what I did, and I'm still kicking myself for that.
Instead I went to the other two places, one felt very out of my league (and to be honest had too much damn space for my needs), the other was a little shabby chic and definitely very 1930's in origin so the layout was ridiculous. But it could have been workable. The location was both great and not perfect, but it was looking like a front runner.
Then, driving back home I got a call from the other agent (which I didn't take, because driving)... which turned into a text message telling me I'd been accepted for the last place we looked at on Saturday.
And that's when I had a little bit of a meltdown. If it didn't have air-con, I definitely didn't want it... if it did I was still unsure about it. It's further from the city than I really would have liked, and there's definitely a number of storage issues (as part of the ongoing feeling I have where I want to beat all architects who design one bedroom apartments with a very large stick and explain to them exactly what is required in terms of both storage and just space in general)... but it has some advantages... plus it's the only place I'd been accepted for at that point.
So I spend the whole of the Australia Day holiday freaking the fuck out to greater or lesser degrees, including a very long phone call with Ma in the morning where I think I pretty much had the meltdown that I should have had as soon as they told me I had to leave here.
I also packed a couple more boxes, did some reorganising and did what I've done for most of the week to avoid disappearing inside my own brain, watch an excessive number of Buzzfeed videos. Which is definitely easy because there's a metric fuckton of them.
Come Wednesday morning, I was emotionally exhausted, so much so that after going to bed at 11pm, I woke up briefly at 3am and my brain refused to let me go back to sleep... eventually I just gave up on trying and picked up my phone and distracted myself with that until it was time to get up and go to work. When I got to work I put in the application for the shabby chic place and tried to work out what to tell the other agent when I called her back.
Turns out she called me first.
So I started the call with "err, problem, no air-con"... she responded with "nah, herpa-derp, air-con"... and I asked if I could call her back in ten minutes.
I nearly just said I'd take it, but I just needed to talk it through with somebody first. Ma was that somebody... lucky Ma. And all of this took place in the front foyer at work, fortunately without crying, wailing and gnashing of teeth which had accompanied the phone call on Tuesday.
Eventually after we'd been pretty much over much of the same ground as we had on that previous call, she finally said, quite quietly "Just take the apartment". It was the perfect thing for her to say at that moment, as it would have done one of two things, either I agree with her and I have my answer or I disagree with her and still have my answer.
Turns out I agreed with her. In fact, I'd been about to say the same thing just as she said it.
So I called the agent back and accepted the apartment. I move in next Saturday. Two years and a month to the day of moving in here.
I'll be completely honest, I'm seeing this as a stepping-stone arrangement. What I would really love to do is buy an apartment, but that takes like money and stuff, so that's going to have to wait, especially since I don't know what's going on with work after the middle of this year.
My general issues with the place as it stands are the lack of storage space, its distance from the city (which I think is going to be the ongoing sore point) and some few other minor niggles that can mostly be solved by a couple of trips to IKEA.
In the plus column, it doesn't have a west facing anything, which is new and different as far as places I've lived in are concerned, and it also has wooden floors, so I don't have to worry about a) dark sock fluff on light tan carpets, b) mystery marks on light tan carpets and c) having to get the carpets steam cleaned when I move out. Also it's nice and close to the shops at Burnside (closer than I currently am to the Village here in North Adelaide to be honest), so that's going to be useful. Especially as there is both a Bendigo Bank and a post office in the complex.
Once I finally said yes it was a matter of starting all the other arrangements that need to happen when you move house. And you always forget just how fucking expensive all those little things are. Forget the big stuff of the bond and the two weeks rent and the cost of actual moving men. Stuff like disconnecting and reconnecting your phone, gas and electricity... and that shit comes with a cost. Cleaning the carpets is fucking expensive (but better than not getting the bond back), even rolls of bubblewrap are expensive given what they actually are.
And that's even before I have to buy some kind of storage solutions for my clothes... or the kitchen.
I also lost the majority of Thursday morning at work to making a ton of phone calls to organise the utilities and internets and whatnot. It's so weird that even in the two years since I moved into this place that some of that stuff has gotten more complicated. Or else there's just something about this particular move that has attracted a general level of complication to it.
Like the fact that for the first time since I moved out of home I'll have a different landline number. Sure there was about six months between moving to Golden Grove with Ludo and then moving into Lownee's old place, but when I came back to North Adelaide, I was actually able to get the same phone number back... and I've had it ever since. Now I have some random collection of numbers for the new place, which will take me forever to memorise since I never give it to people anyway.
On the upside, since I made the decision to take the apartment I haven't wanted to burst randomly into tears for seemingly no particular reason. And my appetite has returned which is good, but has also meant that I ended up buying random take-out several nights this week.
I will miss the take-out opportunities in North Adelaide, even though I usually tend to go to the same two or three places.
But, getting back to this week...
By the time Friday rolled around I'd packed up seventeen boxes, mostly the small ones full of DVDs and books and stuff... and they've started to take over the far corner of the living room.
This morning Ma was off to get her hair did first thing, so I was on my own for shopping... and it didn't seem that there was much point in getting a ton of things given that I'd just have to pack them all up again by the end of the week, so I kept it pretty casual... although I decided that I was slightly bored with salads, so I'm going to make a batch of potato and leek soup for lunches this week.
On the plus side, because I probably don't need as much as I'm going to end up making, I'll have some for dinners as well. I'm also planning on overloading it with a lot of the cheese rinds that I've been shoving in the freezer for the last few months.
And it'll be nice and cathartic... and also the very last pot of soup I ever make in this apartment. I feel like there's going to be a lot of that this week... "this is the last X, I'll X in this apartment". Like the Australia Day fireworks... last fireworks I'm going to see from that bedroom window.
When Ma came down I kind of burbled a bunch of information at her and then we took a quick trip to Bunnings to pick up some more packing tape (and some FRAGILE tape, because the stickers they give you never last long enough)... and if I'd known then how the day was going to progress, I would have picked up a big roll of bubblewrap then.
I was also on the lookout for a similar portable counter to the one I bought when I first moved in here (as seen in these photos), but it looks like the company who made it doesn't even make anything similar any more. I didn't see anything slightly similar either, which is a little annoying... but I may have to first see how much stuff I can actually get into my new kitchen cupboards and figure out what I actually need from there.
Then we headed back here, and started packing things up... we were supposed to be packing up the stuff from the kitchen that I wasn't going to need between now and the move, but I was trying to attack something else first and Ma started wrapping up the artwork I'd moved to make room for boxes, so that kind of turned into a thing.
Did I have a metric fuckton of artwork last time I moved? Yes, yes I did. Did I have as much artwork as I do now? No... there's a whole bunch of posters and things I put into the really cheap and simple IKEA frames while I've been here... and I had at least half a dozen things professionally framed. And it took me varying degrees of time to get things on the walls... some of it was fairly quick after I moved in, other things took a while before I got them how I wanted them (and they progressed even after those photos were taken).
But as long as it took to get everything up on the walls, taking it all down and pulling all the Command hooks off the wall (with not a single casualty... although there were a couple of the little tiny ones that I ended up having to pull off the wall when the tabs broke... they came off clean though) took a little over an hour. And left me with a bag full of plastic and metal. Plus an apartment with bare walls that it now undeniably the apartment of somebody who's moving out.
While I was pulling hooks off the wall, Ma continued to wrap the artwork, then at a certain point I pulled a bunch of stuff out of the top kitchen cupboards... pantry stuff, most of my tea gear, that kind of thing... and basically just spread it all over the kitchen counter as stuff that needed to be put away.
Then I went to attack the wardrobe... and if there was ever an indication that I have a serious problem when it comes to both underwear and socks, it would be the fact that I literally threw away a giant bag full of both that I never wear anymore and which had been relegated to just taking up space in the bottom of the wardrobe.
Yeah, I know, there is definitely going to be some serious sorting of shit once I get to the new place (yeah, again, I know, it's better to throw stuff out before you go, but I really don't know how much space I'm going to end up with, so it's going to have to be after).
Around that point we headed out to grab some lunch and a giant roll of bubblewrap from the Bunnings in Kent Town. Note to myself... the Bunnings in Kent Town is tiny and has a really shitty car park, don't go there again.
On the way back to stopped off at the Bakery for assorted pies and whatnot, then back here for more packing...
In the end we only really packed four boxes, however that doesn't include the three boxes that are full of bundled up artworks... I just haven't sealed them or given then an official number (yeah, again, I know... I'm just keeping track of things in the notes on my phone so I don't have to write a bunch of stuff on the tops of the boxes). I also don't know if I'm going to let the movers move them or do what I did last time and move anything that I'm a little twitchy about by myself.
So Ma is coming back down tomorrow to help me finish off some more of the packing... then I have next Friday off to finish things up and pick off the keys to the new place, then Saturday the movers show up in the afternoon.
Like last time I'll be offline from when I move until I get internet reconnected, and hopefully that will only take about five days like last time (although given that I kept the same number last time, who the fuck knows this time). I'm also not sure exactly when they're going to cut off the phone here... I think it may end up being Friday morning, so that'll suck slightly for keeping myself entertained Friday evening.
So yeah, it's all really happening... and in roughly the same frame as last time.
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