Our House

Who would have thought that moving out of our house would be such an adventure!

After all, we only had to do a few things before we left Switzerland.

Pack a few boxes (100+ was the final count)

Packing the living room

decide what clothes to throw away

Ann packing her vast array of clothes (now 50% gone)

take a few trips to the recycling center

One of many trips to the recycling center

sell a few pieces of furniture, update a few insurance contracts, and a couple of other dozen “small” things. Piece of cake! (more on cake later)

An Event Worth Organising (Ann’s Speciality)

Anyone who knows me well, knows I am not one for organisation, planning, or thinking far into the future. Ann is the exact opposite.

Thank god for that. She had a list for everything. Including a list to keep track of all the lists! (Only joking). But, as a recovering event manager, it all came in handy especially when you ended up with over 100 boxes, various large pieces of furniture and 4 bikes.

And all of that had to fit into a 30m3 box. That sounds like a lot, but it is 2m x 5m and 3m high. Maybe the size of your bedroom?

We had taken that size on the advice of specialists but were not 100% sure everything would fit. We had even done a quick calculation on paper with all our furniture and boxes, but that was before we were packed.

The Big Day(s)

After quite a few months of planning, and then a final month of packing (after some pre-packing, sorting, throwing things out, selling some furniture, throwing more things out, selling even more stuff, and then throwing some more things out). We were kind of ready for the BIG MOVE.

It would be three days of chaos.

  • Moving everything into our storage
  • Cleaning the house
  • Handing it back to the owners (and praying we got our deposit back)

We were ready. More than ready!

The Moving Company

And then the nightmare started: the moving company was late, very late. On top of that, they were not briefed and a bunch of amateurs who had never or maybe once moved a box. Ann was slowly fuming. (“we should have done it ourselves or asked ETH Transport, then it would have been done yesterday!”)

They basically had to move 110 boxes of all the same size and wrap a few pieces of furniture. No dismantling, no packing, nada. Even that was beyond their capabilities.

The Moving Vans

Mama mia, what kind of fools had we gotten.

Ann and I started to take charge to ensure things got wrapped correctly, especially the expensive stuff. And then we saw the packing in the van! Ann has a lot of experience with such things through her events, and she was in shock. They really had no clue, so again we took charge.

Zebra Storage

To cut things short, we told them to unload our stuff in front of the storage and bugger off. Then we played a game of Tetris and got it all in. YES!

Everything fit. Just!

The Cleaning Company

The cleaning company arrived only 3 hours late. Ann lost it completely. In the end, some cleaning crew turned up (not the ones we engaged), had no idea what they had to clean, but did a great job. Poor guys. We did feel sorry for them. It was not their fault.

The Final Sale of the Car

We snuck in the car sale just before the landlord arrived. They had already inspected it, but they did another quick check to see if everything was ok.

A marder ate our car!
  • Oh no, a marder (like a rubber eating possum) had eaten the rubber around the window (new rubber needed)
  • Opps, there was a stone chip (tiny) on the window (new window)
  • Ahh, there was a small break on the driver side mirror

But Miss Van der Aa, you can claim it all on insurance for free! A quick phone call and it was done! Thank god.

Back to the house…..

The Handover

We were worried that the landlord would be difficult, but in the end, they seemed to trust us so much after 9 years in the house that they did not even open the fridge or the oven. Ann had to force them to see how clean everything was! We handed over the keys and got out. It was still quite emotional, but it hadn’t really sunken in yet, that we had no more home!

Cake with the Neighbour!

Our neighbour wanted to see us before we left and he had backed us a cake (and made us dinner earlier in the week). Who can complain after such a busy week. He had helped us so much, we would have been lost without him.

What a great guy.

Our Neighbour Reto cooking up a storm!

And a big thank you to all the other people helped us get our van ready, be it with all kinds of sewing jobs (Nola, Magda, Vicky, Anne), graphics (Fabienne), spare parts & mechanical advice (Eddy, Jan, Richi), all kinds of random jobs (Reto) and of course, Adi and his crew who actually helped us build the van! (And George who helped me put up the bike rack and is our chief of Admin of course!)

After The Move…

As some of you may know, we also had a lot of trouble registering in ZH (they did not accept us), but won’t go into details about that. Anyone who wants to know can ask us personally 🙂

Next, we left for Italy and are now properly relaxing and recovering (Ann has caught some nasty bug) in Greece. More on that later!

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