That was probably was one of the most cryptic titles I’ve come up with to date! It’s due to the fact that on Saturday, Phil and I went back to the house in Woodbridge where I spent most of my formative years. (Well, I wasn’t there the whole time, but that’s where we were living).
Anyway, after I went off to university – nine years ago – my parents moved to Ipswich. But they didn’t sell the house, the rented it out. Anyway, my Dad is retiring next year, and they want to sell the house. So, they gave the tenant notice, and she moved out last month. The past couple of weeks they’ve been spending a lot of time at the house trying to get it into a state where it can be sold.
You may have guessed that the tenant didn’t exactly leave things in a pristine state. If I’m honest, it was actually pretty awful what she did. She removed a lot of the work surfaces and units from the kitchen, she ‘painted’ – badly – various places, the whole place was filthy… I could go on. On Saturday Phil and I spent most of the day helping Mum and Dad to get the place cleaned up. Phil went into the garden to do some tidying, and I spent the afternoon ripping out a rather badly installed network.
I think she must have had someone come in to network the house (why she didn’t use wireless I don’t know – I think it was available in 2001, but I would guess these network points were installed well after that). Firstly, there were holes all over the house to allow the cables through the floor and up into the loft. Then the cables were basically run across the walls, i.e. there were a boatload of cable clips keeping the cables in place. Unfortunately in some places the cable clips had broken, letting the cable basically droop down! In other words, it was a mess.
So anyway, I basically ripped out the whole lot, leaving a large number of small cable clip holes – but at least it was better than leaving it there. I don’t think anyone else would have wanted it to be honest!
It was quite funny to see the old house to be honest – my room still had my old desk unit in it (which my Dad and I designed and built), but apart from that there was no furniture there. It’s been so long since we lived there that I do feel like it’s not really home any more, but it did bring back a few memories! Good times. Still, live moves on.
That took up most of our Saturday afternoon. Then, after that we went round to Anne-Marie and Sarah’s to watch Doctor Who. It wasn’t a bad episode this week although I don’t think it was exactly a classic. Then we watched the next couple of episodes of ‘Blackpool’ (really enjoying it, only one more episode to go now though!). Oh, and I should mention that ‘Ashes to Ashes’ was also good on Friday night – still so many questions, but I’m really looking forward to the next episode though! Phil says it’s kind of like old school Doctor Who, where they did six part stories and you were kept on tenterhooks until the next week!
On Sunday we weren’t at church in the morning (unusually), so we did a bit of gardening and the like. Then we went round to Jo and Evie’s and spent the day in the park with them, which was a really pleasant way to spend the afternoon. Then we went to Sunday@6, and afterwards watched ‘Young Victoria’. It was a fairly entertaining film but not one I’d really want to watch again to be honest – not my cup of tea!
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