Moving House? Check With Your Cats First…

We’ve just done something massive. 

After years of saving we’ve just bought our first house. Over the past few years the idea of buying a house always seemed like an impossibility.

I left home at 18 and went off to uni.

I had a very good time.

Saving for my future was most definitely not on the radar. 

Then I moved to Brighton and started working.

I continued to have a very good time. Saving continued to avoid the radar! 

But then the kids came along and knowing that I should be saving but feeling unable to save became the norm. Saving whilst being stuck in the rental cycle is hard and most of the time an impossibility.

But against all odds, and after years of working multiple jobs and creating different side hustles, we’ve finally managed it and have just moved our little family into our very first family home.

Surreal is an understatement!

I Hate Moving!

Although the house is beyond brilliant moving has been a total bitch….I hate moving it’s so unbelievably stressful and long gone are the days when I could pack up all my worldly possessions into the boot of a car like when I left to go to uni.

Moving always starts off with the naive belief that you’ve got this. 

You tell yourself that everything is under control, and your organisational skills are unparalleled.

You tell yourself that this is the time to cleanse. It’s time to get rid of all that junk and sort through all the years of accumulated crap. 

And you start with that mentality, you mean to go on with that mentality, you even buy two tape guns to kick the shit out of packing.

But then life just sucker-punches you.

Time runs out and you find your immaculately packed and labelled boxes descending into chaotic mixed boxes of crap. 

All those weird things that you don’t have a subcategory box for just shoved in anywhere and tapped up with TO SORT sprawled largely in sharpie pen all along the outside.

We had the added bonus of having to delay our initial move-in date because I managed to catch the mother of all sickness bugs from my kids. In between my futile attempts to keep packing I was projectile vomiting for 24 hours like the exorcist.

The stress doesn’t stop even after the pack-up and successful move. That’s unfortunately the time that you’ve got to deal with all those manically packed boxes. It’s then that you realise just how many TO SORT boxes of hell you’ve created in your fugue-like packing haze.  

Cats Hate Moving Too!

We have the added bonus of two cats to deal with as well and if you’ve ever moved with a cat then I salute you because it’s mental! 

We had our moving schedule but we didn’t consult the cats…What fools we are!

Typically on the day of our move, we could only get one of them into a cat box, so after many failed attempts we decided to come back and get them the next day. 

My son (aka the cat whisperer) managed to catch them both and after a very stressful journey where one cat free-roamed in the car and the other locked safely inside the cat box, they arrived at the new house on high alert suffering from severe anxiety.

They hid for the first few hours but the older of the two is getting much braver as time rolls on. He still can’t quite figure out how to walk or run on the wooden floor though. 

It’s very funny watching him as he persists in building up to his run looking like a cartoon character slipping up on a puddle of water.

The little one is very nervous and keeps finding the most obscure places to hide, one being under the floorboards of my bath! After squeezing through a tiny gap where the side of the bath was slightly loose she found a cut out in the floor that was the perfect size for her to squeeze into. 

 I honestly thought that I was going to have to pull up the floorboards to get her out but after 24 hours she slinked out covered in cobwebs ate some food took a shit in the litter tray and ran straight back in before I could seal the damn thing!

I’ve given up on trying to keep her out of there and made peace with the fact that that is her home now, it’s just easier that way… 

Another thing that we’d overlooked is their excess energy. 

Because they’re outdoor cats keeping them in means that they have all this pent-up energy, exacerbated by their nervousness that descends into utter madness during the early hours when they run around like total lunatics. 

The Gift Of Time

We’re all taking the positives from this situation though. After years of living 5 minutes from the kid’s school yet always being late, our keyed-up mental cats are giving us the gift of time.

They selflessly ensure that we’re all awake and ready for our 20-minute commute every single morning.

For the first time ever we are actually early. Last week we were there before they’d even opened the gates. For us, this is monumental  – I’m not sure how long it will last and I really don’t want to rely on the cats going berserk forever, but for now, we’ll take the win. 

And, what’s more, to the untrained eye it actually looks like we’ve finally got our shit together and are at last winning at this whole adulting thing!!