We Moved!

 As it says at the top, I wasn't born at the beach but I got here as fast as I could. Imagine spending your childhood in Birmingham as far from the beach as you can get! And then spending another 50 years trying to live by the sea. Well, we made it. A few years later than planned due to pesky Covid - and 50lbs less of me moved thanks to 15 months of long Covid. I'm just beginning to recover now.

We sold our lovely 1930s house in Southampton to the first couple who looked at it. Thankfully they loved the original features and didn't plan to turn it into a building site. Neighbours turning the road into a building site is one of the reasons we moved. There's not much people are allowed to do in a flat and we're the ones making the most noise at the moment.

I couldn't resist making a scrapbook page with the For Sale sign. You can click on any photo to see a larger version on Smugmug.

 

All was well and we started clearing out 38 years' of possessions ready to downsize. We looked at several flats in Bournemouth that weren't going to work, a couple of them because the owners had no intention of moving and were just wasting our time.

Anyone who has ever moved house will know the horror stories but just about everyone we paid a shedload of money to - agents, removeals company, solicitors -  conspired to cause maximum stress, most of it completely unnecessary. Why do we put up with this?

Moving Day was one of the rare very hot days this summer and we'd had very little sleep for days so forgive the exhausted look - and note the journalling about being homeless!

It finally felt worth it when we got there:

It's been months of work and plumbers and electricians coming and going (basically we had one single socket per room...) but new neighbours are lovely, we're 20 minutes walk from the best beach and there's a large outdoor pool which is a real joy. I'm sure swimming nearly every day helped with my health problems. Oh, and John has a man cave. In the first few weeks after we moved he'd go to the garage to get something and disappear for hours as his new chums wanted to talk to him.

Here's the pool (and my Dad snuck in there...)

On the balcony and at the beach catching the last rays of summer (such as it was...)

And the paddling continues well into the autumn!

Drop me an email if you'd like to see more photos! Credit: Many of the scrapbook pages on here were created with templates designed by Katie Pertiet.