Despite all my careful planning, the move was unavoidably chaotic. If it hadn’t have been for the willingness of the family to help out, I am certain we would never have been able to get the flat empty and clean in time for the new tenant. As an aside: the notion that a stranger is now living in my home is just too weird!

In all honesty, moving-day itself wasn’t too bad. My careful labeling of boxes, and pre-disassembly and protective-wrapping of all big furniture pieces made for a pretty streamlined process. We even spent the night before filling the van with a first load of boxes. The only thing that threatened to rain on our parade, was the weather (see what I did there). Mind you, the days before and after could have been mistaken for summer, but never mind. After making an early start, we successfully conquered the bulk of the items in two, strategically-timed-so-as-to-miss-the-rain, van and trailer loads. Or so we thought…

It turns out that all those ‘other’ things you own, you know, the ones that don’t fit nicely into boxes, or the ones that you need right up to the last minute, or anything that you might broadly classify as ‘misc’ – well, we have a lot of those! The evening of moving-day was spent attempting to consolidate these items. Oh, and packing! In all my excitement, I’d forgotten to factor in the time it would take to pack the things we were actually taking with us! Needless to say we didn’t get much sleep, not least because were essentially camping on the floor or the flat as most of our useful stuff was now gone or packed away. It was a bit of a laugh.

By the next morning I was dead on my feet. Mom and Mina arrived early to help with the cleaning and the last van and car load of stuff was packed. By noon we were out and we spent the rest of the day organizing the storage area that would house our possession for the coming year. In hindsight, I’m a bit sad that amidst all the moving frenzy I didn’t take a moment to say a proper goodbye to the flat. It served me well for six years and now we technically had nowhere to call home. Sister generously took us in for the weekend which meant that we were able to relax and enjoy our last few days on South African soil. For that, we are immeasurably grateful.