I am officially allowed to start talking about the fact that in three months time, we will be moving to Adelaide! I’m both terribly excited about this, and horribly terrified! We made the decision a year ago, with the help of some of Ollie’s wonderful family members – many of whom live there, and who have been encouraging us to go.

It has been a strange couple of years, and I am still working on writing up my account of the Feb quake that almost took Ollie from us. I’m thinking that I will get it written and posted for the two year anniversary.

I’m looking forward to the change in scenery. Adelaide is so beautiful, and it’s looking very likely that we’ll end up living close to the beach! I’m a Nelson girl originally, the beach is my soul. There is nowhere else I’d rather be, than walking along a beach, in ALL kinds of weather. I am very partial to overcast, cooler days – a love that has been born from my 16 years of living here in Christchurch.

For such a long time, it felt like we had forever before anything was going to happen, and now I realise that very soon, we’ll be putting our house on the market! I think I’ve been slightly in denial when it comes to how long we have left. It hit me the other day, and I had a complete meltdown! Nothing was happening! We still have so much stuff to get rid of! An entire household of stuff! It seemed like we were getting nowhere fast and that we would never get it all done.

But the weekend just gone has been great. We managed to do quite a few things and have started progressing forward again. My laundry is complete, although I am not at all interested in continuing on with the bathroom. I had this idealistic dream that it would be loads of fun and really relaxing for me to get into it and paint. You know, meditative. Yeah…no.

Deep down, I knew I’d secretly hate it, but I had no idea just how intense that hatred would be. Painting SUCKS. It’s messy and slow, and BORING and even plugged into music I couldn’t wait until it was over. It looks lovely in there, but good god it sucked!

I would love to be one of those people for whom DIY was fun and exciting and achievable. The problem is, I have the concentration skills of a two year old and I get bored so easily. I also hate hard labour.  My hands were made for looking pretty, and for writing, not painting. It’s a bit depressing to realise just how much I detest the whole painting thing. I had wonderful fantasies about painting our house when we move; 0f self decorating and being great at it, and making it my job.

My enthusiasm reached epic levels and my lovely, encouraging husband said “maybe you’ve found your passion. Home decorating and writing.”  Yes! I thought. Yes, that’s exactly it! This is what I was supposed to do! This is what makes me happy! This DIY, this home decoration, this painting and fixing and doing stuff! This will fulfil all my deepest desires!

Yeah, no.

It’s nothing like that at all. It’s boring, and lonely and depressing and hard. Painting is really HARD! My arms were screaming for mercy! I could hear them begging me to stop, but I couldn’t stop, because the laundry still needed ANOTHER COAT.

Three coats of paint later, I could quite happily have squirted lighter fluid all through that damn laundry and set the place on fire.

And yet….I still have to do at the very least, the skirting boards, cupboards and windowsills in the bathroom and the toilet. I had set myself the task of doing them in the kitchen too. *snorts* Then EQC said they’d pay to get it all fixed up – because there was more damage in the December quakes, which was really exciting news for me! They said we would get money to fix up the broken wall under the kitchen sink and to fix a few small cracks in the laundry, plus the garage including having that repainted too. And then we find out that there are also around 35,000 other claimants in the queue, which of course means, by the time we leave this place in December, we won’t have been paid to fix it.

Conundrums internet!

Anyway, it has been many weeks since I finished the laundry, and while I would like it to be many weeks before I have to start on the bathroom. Time is running out! We’re getting the place valued soon, and then we’ll be putting it on the market, and then people will be coming in to view it! ARGH!

Must somehow get rid of pretty much everything we own and make the house presentable in the next three or so weeks! I just don’t know how all of this stuff works!

In the meantime, Ollie and I are heading to Adelaide in late October to check schools and areas to live in. It will be the first time he and I have gone anywhere for any real length of time together without the kids! I’m pretty excited about that.