It's not coming together

We planned to vacate the house at Warrandyte at 8.00am, but it just wasn’t happening.

Despite what I thought was my diligence in packing our remaining stuff into cartons, S seemed to keep on bringing more and more stuff into the room. Was it breeding? Was I in the Twilight Zone? The lounge room looked a wreck. There was stuff everywhere. Then Melody came by to show off the house to one of her friends. Just what we needed!

I didn't know what to do with half the stuff. A few hurried visits to Fort Knox self storage helped, but not much. Our storage space at Fort Knox was now badly packed (which meant there was wasted space), but it was full. Some of the stuff in storage was precariously balanced too; I hope there’s not too much disturbance from passing trains vibrating the ground as they go by. It’ll all come tumbling down in a heap if the floor vibrates.

A trip to the dump was required, and while there I also took the opportunity to get rid of some good stuff by donating it to the recycle shop. This was a small thing, but despite hurrying it still took much more time than we could afford. This is actually a nice service the Nillumbik council provide. They run a shop at the dump. Anything that looks mildly valuable is put in the shop and sold. It’s a kind of a really down market op shop. It’s something that should be encouraged.

As a kid I used to love going to the dump. The treasures you could find at the dump kept me distracted for hours, and funnily enough I’ve still got one or two bottles I found as a kid.

We took some rubbish to the dump about three years ago during one of the council’s hard rubbish days, and noticed there was a pile of brick pavers there. Well, having a ute and seeing them looking quite good it didn’t take too much consideration to start loading them into the ute. There wasn't a huge number of pavers there, but there was a nice amount. We collected them and took them home, and within a few months we had dug out an area and paved an area in front of one of our park benches, and we built a raised garden bed next to it, and it all looked very nice.

Anyway, I'm getting distracted. There was still too much stuff remaining to be packed, and really no where for it to go. There was only one solution: it had to be left.

I rang Melody, and asked if we can leave some stuff at the house. She obliged. So, this was our situation:

• our immobile camper was now propped up and would stay
• the camper was packed full with stuff as a temporary measure
• more stuff (tools, steel, hardware) was stored below the camper,
• more stuff was stored in front of the camper
• pot plants were placed at the sides of the camper
• The garage bench was chockers full of stuff
• the space between the bench and the garage door was full of stuff
• the tool room which runs off the garage was also full
• there was also an overflow from the tool room into the garage, and
• the shelves in the garage also had our stuff on them.

There was obviously a lot to do still.