Caliban – Opinion and Righteous Anger

It’s been quite a week. The only way to deal with it was to spread one’s arms, surrender to the oncoming wave and attempt to ride atop it.

After the hectic phone calls and final arrangements for the move last Monday and Tuesday, Wednesday was a relatively calm day with little to do but contemplate the days ahead.

Thursday morning, the removal company arrived at 08:00 sharp to pack all of our stuff. It was the first time we’d ever had someone else pack us instead of doing it ourselves.

This process scarcely needed any management from us, so we went out to breakfast and then on to the new house to meet with a garden architect and discuss plans for a new garden.

By 16:00, all of our stuff was ready to go, including disassembled bookcases and shelving from the cellar. Those units originally took hours to put together, so this was no mean feat. I couldn’t believe that two blokes had accomplished in just 8 hours (including lunch and fag breaks) what usually takes us weeks of stress and fatigue.

They achieve this by not pausing to examine each item and not stopping to consider whether something should be thrown or given away. Everything upon which their gaze falls is mercilessly packed, whether it be a television set or bin-liner full of vacuum-cleaner dust. They also do this work every day, so they’re a lot more skilled at packing, anyway.

Well, the television, couch and bed were mercifully left unpacked, so we enjoyed a relatively normal Thursday evening.

The painters in the new house had also finished their work on Thursday, as had the man who came to spruce up the parquet flooring. So, with the workmen gone, the house was now ready to receive us and our belongings.

Friday morning, the removal company was back, this time at 07:45 and now with five men in tow. All week, I’d been going to bed several hours earlier than normal, knowing how much energy would be required in the days ahead. I don’t know how I found the self-discipline, but I’m very glad I did.

With five burly geezers managing the move, things progressed quickly. Amazingly, the entire contents of our house had been loaded into the van by 11:15. Minutes later, the van was pulling up 200m around the corner at our new house.

The second half of the move naturally took longer. Not only did everything have to be unloaded, but it wasn’t clear where some of the larger items should go and the disassembled items of furniture now had to be reassembled.

Nevertheless, everything was completed by 17:00 and so, after thanking the movers profusely, we said goodbye and closed our new front door behind us for the first time.

That evening, Sarah went out to relax with friends, while I stayed at home and unpacked some boxes. I noticed that our phone line, which had been moved by the KPN that same morning and converted to ISDN, was giving an engaged signal to incoming calls. We could make outgoing calls with no problem.

Saturday was a day spent unpacking boxes, a seemingly never-ending sequence of them. There’s not much else to say about Saturday, other than that I took Eloïse to the Little Gym in the morning and the cleaners came in the afternoon to help us get the house ship-shape. I also found time to go out and buy a few nice things for our lovely new bathroom.

Sunday took us back to the old house, where we washed a few remaining dishes that had been left unpacked for us to eat off. The removal company had missed a thin rack drawer of spices, so Sarah packed that and I disappeared into the cellar to break down loads of old boxes and dismantle our computer equipment.

We’d also brought in a cleaner to help us clear up at the old house, as we wanted to leave it in a respectable state for our buyers. That afternoon, I turned the key and locked the front door for the very last time.

Sarah continued to unpack the kitchen boxes, while I got started on my office. I have less bookshelf space in the new office than in the old one, so I’m probably going to have to consign some less useful books to deeper storage elsewhere in the house.

Monday was another early day. It was the day of the transfer of the old house. The three of us took a final walk around the house and made our peace with parting with it. Outside, the Prins Hendriklaan was being dug up by the council in preparation for the deep sewage system that has been making its way down the Sophialaan for well over a year. We had got out in the nick of time, because within a day, the entire section of the street would be inaccessible to traffic, including removal company vans.

After the walkthrough, we drove to the notary’s office, where we signed the leveringsakte and transferred ownership of the house to the buyers. They seemed a little nervous and apprehensive, as I’m sure I did on both occasions that I bought a house. I think they were also first-time buyers, which adds to the anxiety, as your head is buzzing with dozens of questions and concerns.

And, just like that, it was over. We were no longer the owners of the house we had still been living in until just three days earlier. I shed a tear in the car park of the notary’s office on the way out. It was the end of a very significant era.

In the afternoon, a guy came over to fix a broken curtain rod in the new house, which I’ll now stop calling our new house, since it’s now our only house. I didn’t get much done in the afternoon, because Sarah was off at inburgering, so I was left literally holding the baby.

Today, an engineer from the electrical installation company came over to reprogram the telephone exchange and perform routine maintenance on the alarm system, including replacing some standby power battery units.

Happily, our land-line is now reachable from the outside world once again and our alarm system is functional and programmed with our new codes.

The curtain rod guy came back to paint over his wall repair from yesterday and that pretty much marks the end of Tuesday. Not much unpacking got done, because Sarah was once again at inburgering in the afternoon, but the money from the sale of the old house did come through, which was very satisfying. That really does close the most recent chapter in our lives.

The new owners of our old house have already moved in. I caught a glimpse of their move in action earlier this afternoon, with a lift hoisting their possessions up to the first floor window.

It’s not ideal to move into a house that you bought just 24 hours earlier, because you typically want to have some work done whilst the place is still empty, but they had no choice. With the local council literally digging away the ground from under them, it was all they could do to hold back the council from uprooting the last few metres of that section of the street for 24 hours, just to give themselves enough time to move in. Otherwise, with the street turned into a building site for several months, they wouldn’t have been able to move in until early 2008.

If the first casualty of war is the truth, then the first casualty of a move in The Netherlands is one’s DSL line. Sure enough, the KPN has royally fucked up everything once again and it’s as yet unknown when our line will be up and running again.

So, how am I writing this?

Fortune has smiled upon us once more and someone in the neighbourhood isn’t too particular about his network security, so I’m gratefully receiving a piggy-back ride from this generous soul. This is a welcome stopgap until the KPN pull their bloody finger out and get our own line back up and running.

Things are hectic in the run up to the move to the new house, so I do feel as if I have something in common with the Dervishes.

Yesterday, I made 40 outgoing calls on my mobile phone. I’m not sure how many I made today, but it was probably only a quarter of that number.

Some of those calls were to inform people of our change of address. Most changes of address can be performed on-line these days, but some, such as school waiting list registrations, are still handled the old-fashioned way: by physical post or telephone.

A team of painters is at work in the new house and there were a couple of cleaners there today. The parquet floor will be worked on starting tomorrow evening. There’s a lot to get done this week, with only four days between the receipt of the keys and the move. Unfortunately, circumstances dictated this time frame to us; it’s certainly not what we would have chosen.

With a little luck (OK, a huge amount of luck), the move of our DSL line will take mere days this time, as opposed to weeks. A complicating factor this time, however, is that the analogue line in our current home will be replaced by an ISDN line in the new house. This is to enable the use of ISDN equipment already present in the house, amongst which, for example, the dialler belonging to the alarm installation. It makes sense to reuse the equipment that is already there, rather than try to hammer a square peg into a round hole.

A consequence of this is the need for a new ADSL modem, namely one suitable for use with an ISDN line. However, if my ISP is to be believed, that aspect of the move has now been taken care of and one will soon be winging its way to me. After this Friday, though, it’s anybody’s guess when I’ll next be able to post a blog entry.

The day we signed the deed of transfer (leveringsakte), I noticed that the thermostat was displaying a blinking error code. Bloody great. Our first maintenance issue and the ink’s not even dry yet on the deed.

After wading through some paperwork pertaining to the house, I figured out who had installed the boiler and called them on Monday for an appointment. The repairman came today and fixed the problem, but he indicated that it has recurred on a regular basis over the last few years and that the previous owner definitely knew about it. Shame on him for not informing us!

Anyway, at least the problem was (temporarily) fixed, so we’ll have hot water now when we move in on Friday. That really would have been a cold shower, both literally and figuratively.

The movers come to start packing us on Thursday and execute the move on Friday. It’s the first time we’ve had movers pack our belongings instead of doing it ourselves and I’m curious to see how well that goes. The parking exemption signs have already been placed by the council on the kerb outside both houses, so that’s another concrete sign that we really are leaving this lovely house behind.

Happily, though, we’re going only 200 metres around the corner. We really love the neighbourhood and would never consider leaving. Unfortunately, the hassle of moving is scarcely reduced by the close proximity of the new house. It’s handy for letting workmen in and out this week, but the move itself will hardly be any easier than if we were moving to Maastricht.

In a few days, the worst will be behind us and then will begin the slow process of unpacking and taking care of all the niggling little irritations in the house. It’s back to square one, as far as that’s concerned.

We’re moving.

We’ve bought a new house and will be moving into it this coming Friday. The transfer of the keys took place at the end of last week.

Our current house has been sold and the transfer of the keys will occur next Monday.

Needless to say, none of this happened overnight.

Back in April, our current house was finally at the stage that most of its minor irritations had been fixed. It was no longer just our house, but had slowly evolved to become our home, and none of us could imagine leaving it. We had come to love it as an old and trusted friend.

But life is full of surprises, as they say.

We have an unwritten list of interesting properties in the [Willemspark](http://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willemspark_(Amsterdam)) neighbourhood; houses that, if they were ever to be put on the market, would warrant, at the very least, a cursory visit. And so it occurred that one of the houses on our unwritten list went up for sale. It was mere happenstance that I came to be looking at the housing market around the same time, or I would have been none the wiser.

I called the selling agent the next day and we went to view the property that afternoon. To our surprise, we liked it a lot. We were struck by the more practical internal layout, that is better suited to a family with children. It’s also considerably bigger and semi-detached (not that we don’t like to have neighbours, but it’s nice to be able to go around the side of your house with bikes, have workmen come into the garden without needing to traipse through the house, etc.).

Within 24 hours, we thus went from being perfectly happy with our current home (or so we thought) to light-heartedly considering purchasing a new one.

Well, those airy considerations soon turned into earnest deliberations. No stone was left unturned in treading a path towards what is — let’s face it — one of the most important and drastic decisions of one’s life. Never before have I thought so long and hard about a decision: not when resigning or accepting a new job; not when getting married; not when deciding to have children; not even when deciding to buy our current house.

The pressure of wanting to make the right decision — make that ‘not wanting to make the wrong decision’ — weighed heavily on me, and I became brooding and irritable. What should have been a fun thing to think about (at least, I like to think it could have been) took the form of a worrisome burden, a predicament from which I sought an escape. I began to curse the day that I discovered the house was for sale, because now I could think about nothing else.

More than a month passed, during which time we totalled five viewings. My friend Geoff got to see it when he was here for Koninginnedag; Sarah’s folks saw it during their May trip. By that time, I was virtually convinced that any house that you’re still uncertain about after that many viewings is one you shouldn’t buy, on that basis alone.

But in the end, buy it we did. Not that that signalled the end of the emotional oscillation; oh no. We had set a transfer date three months into the future, so that we could forget about the thing that had consumed our lives for the last month and however many weeks, and just enjoy the coming summer.

During that period, however, I came to doubt the wisdom of our decision and yes, I must admit, there was a brief period that I even regretted it. We were giving up a stable family home and for what? We weren’t even dissatisfied with our current home, so it seemed that what we were doing was entirely unnecessary; greedy even.

The period of recriminations passed, however, and a final, emphatic line was drawn through them when we performed the final inspection on the day of the transfer, at which time we finally got to see the house empty. In that state, it came into its own. The previous owner’s furniture had been a far cry from our own taste and I hadn’t realised until the inspection just how much that had tainted my ability to view the intrinsic qualities of the house on their own merit.

In the meantime, we had taken advantage of the buoyant housing market in Amsterdam and put our own house on the market back in June. It was important to list it before half the country (and thus half the potential buyers) buggered off on holiday for half the summer.

After a period of frenzied preparation, photos were taken, a brochure was made and the house went on the market. Weeks of having to make ourselves scarce during viewings ensued. Everyone from Dutch TV personalities to foreign families with children viewed the house.

After one month, the house had managed to attract its buyer and the deed of sale (koopakte) was drawn up.

An amalgam of joy, melancholy and relief clouded my mind the day we received the telephone call informing us that a deal had been reached. Even though the legal point of no return had long since passed on the purchase of the new house, it wasn’t until the old one had been sold that it truly felt as if an unstoppable momentum had been attained and that there was now only one way forwards.

So, we went from deliberation to decision, on to doubt and then resignation, and finally arrived at enthusiasm. It’s been a long, exhausting journey and we haven’t even moved in yet!