Home is where .....

Thursday 24th April

Today was a bit more manic than I would have liked.  We had to be up bright and early, as our lovely gas man (and general project manager) was due to turn up at 8am. He turned up in good time, and despite a few intakes of breath at some of the more interesting features of the house, he didn't run away screaming, and has agreed to take on the task of trying to get a lot of work done in 8 weeks - bless him! His first job was to cut off the gas supply completely, as, as I had worked out during my random wake up in the middle of the night, if the gas boiler was leaking, then it was not safe to leave the system as it was, as anyone passing could choose to turn the gas tap on and cause malicious damage to the house (boom....)
The boy and I visited the last of four schools in the nearby area, and I ran around frantically trying to work out which pile all of the stuff in the house had to go into, out of, 1) borrowed stuff, to be returned (subdivided into 5, to be claimed by the appropriate person), 2) our stuff, to be packed in boxes and left at the house, 3) our stuff, to be taken home, 4) food stuffs, to be given to anyone prepared to take and eat them before they went off!

The boy was very excited to be helping our gas man with the cutting off of the gas supply, and with digging up the front garden in what turned out to be a vain attempt to find the outside stop cock for the water supply! We now have a big hole in our front garden, but will have to talk nicely to Cambridge water to see if they can sort out either, a) finding the external stop cock, or b) installing a new external stop cock.

I finally finished getting everything into its right places, and the boy and I set off with two large suitcases for the first leg of our journey home, and meeting Matt at the station.

It was strange coming into Cardiff. It was lovely knowing that we were coming back to creature comforts, such as a bed, and heating etc, and a grumpy cat. But it was also the feeling that we had left 'home' back in Cambridge. We currently have two homes - home is where my cat is? It's an unsettling time really, very strange.

But we've now spent a couple of hours designing a bathroom and planning an electrical installation ready for the electrician's visit in the morning.  All fun and games, but it's time for bed now, and I promise photos of all of this will go up online somewhere tomorrow! Night all...