First Steps

Everything I'd bought was due to arrive over the next few days so I spent a lot of time at the house scrubbing the floors to try to get rid of the smell and cleaning the bathroom and the bit of kitchen that there was. In between this I was backwards and forwards to my old home fetching the boxes that had been packed in the garage for weeks, no mean feat in a two seater car but paying a removal firm was out of the question. My ex was putting pressure on me to have our cats, the kitten I had bought a few weeks before I left was being a nightmare and he wanted rid of him. The cats couldn't come to my mothers with me as her dog is a hunting dog and to her the cats were prey so that wasn't possible and the minute my new bed and matress was delivered he insisted on bringing my daughter's bed to the house. I had left so I was in it alone and no help was offered to move any more of her stuff or the many many boxes. I could have done with a few extra days as the house wasn't really habitable but I was too tired for more upset and also ready to bring things to a conclusion so we spent our first night in the house. Not the usual excitment of moving into a new home, far from it but it was a relief to finally be getting somewhere in my quest for a better life.
My daughters friends father had a van and I was so so grateful when he offered to move my daughters wardrobe and the boxes that my ex had packed of her things. He'd cleared out both the kids bedrooms within days, turning my sons room into his office and my daughters all fitted out as a guest room, goodness knows how that made her feel. So it was my job to make a new home for them, to rebuild their security and I began by stripping off the lovely woodchip wallpaper downstairs. The ceilings were yellow so cleaning down and painting those made a huge difference. A couple of sentences does not portray the hours that doing these two jobs took. That wallpaper had been up there for years and it was reluctant to move, the mess, the smell, the crumbling plaster, it was grim!

I suppose in hindsight it would have been better to take a few weeks just to get straight and rest from it all and it wasn't really sensible to spend money doing up a house I didn't yet own and had no garuntees of actually owning. But living in those conditions was grim and I figured that doing the prep work of stripping back, sanding paintwork and putting up lining paper wouldn't cost any more than I was prepared to loose and besides I wanted to make a start on improving the house. The hard work had begun and boy was it hard work!