Today is the first day of the rest of our lives may be a cliché but today really is the start of our gap year. Yesterday the removal men came and packed the contents of the house into boxes and then containers to be taken off into storage. Last night we said our final goodbye to our neighbours – Richard & Sharon, we wish you well for your move to the Cayman Islands; Chris, we hear that you’ve let the goldfish escape already!
Today we handed over the keys to the house to our agents ready for the cleaning and inventory taking prior to our tenants moving in over the weekend. We know how Tamsin & Chris must be feeling about their packing – but we hope they have a fantastic year in our house and that they enjoy living in Fieldside as much as we have done.
The other beginning for today is the start of our Olympic volunteering. Janet has her first shift (of 13) and so could no long put off the wearing of her volunteer uniform. I dropped her at Didcot station and she seemed to be attracting some attention.
It was not until Stratford station that I met anyone else similarly attired. After that It was quite surreal seeing groups of adults all dressed the same moving about the Athlete’s village where I am working. The village is still quiet as the Athletes have not yet arrived but everyone is scurrying around with last minute preparations. It is a very friendly bunch of people that I am working with, checking in the other volunteers and helping out whereever needed. It should be great fun but will be hard work when it gets busier next week. It is good to have a quiet start learning what to do.
All very real now then Dave, enjoy Olympics, I hope it is just a little bit like Twenty Twelve. Then have a great trip, no doubt your iPod and failover iPod will be packed with Rush anthems.
Thanks, Gav. Can never have too much Rush on your playlist. (I do try to avoid the poison that is iTunes though!).
Re-reading the post, the other thing that is worth saying is that all those people who said to us “you’ll be surprised at the cost of storage” were absolutely right. Even worse, insurance (and particularly fire insurance) is a further c. 40% on top of the storage costs. Storage cost is by volume and insurance is by value so not direcly related – but I was still absolutely staggered.
My advice to others would be:
1. Get rid of as much stuff as possible – charity, recycle or dump.
2. Haggle. When I complained about the cost of the insurance, they said that they couldn’t do anything about it, but the did drop the cost of storage.
3. Store stuff elsewhere. We put a lock on one of the roof space storage areas in the house and put a fair bit of (low value but high volume) stuff in there. This got us down from 4 storage containers (see picture) to 3. This will save us something like £500 over the year.