Bit of background

Looking out to Tring from King Charles Ride up in Wigginton - our front garden for nearly five years!

Bishopsfield, Wigginton and the wonderful people in the Tring area we’ve been lucky enough to meet and now call our friends, it's all been an awesome experience. But ever since Andy and I met, we’ve planned a big move this year to find somewhere to settle and finally buy our home for life.

Four weeks previously, we signed on the dotted line, well virtually at least, to pack up and leave the place we’ve called home for the last four years and nine months. We’re moving down to West Devon in to a quirky little grade 2 chocolate box cottage on the edge of Dartmoor, just outside Okehampton.

We employed In-Excess Removals, a local firm, to move us – we have always moved ourselves in the past, but we’ve spread out considerably at Bishopsfield with extra furniture and just so much stuff, (and we’re all a bit older and more knackered) so without question time to call in the professionals.

The new cottage is a bit smaller than Bishopsfield, and it doesn’t have a loft – but it does have a big storage barn attached. So we decided to pack up ourselves, in order to have a bit of a clear out and to decide what to keep stored away in the barn and not unpack until the next move.

Why do we always leave these things until the last minute, we’ve known we were going to move now since the summer – and I kept saying ‘I must start packing up this house’ but no, so much more fun to cram it all in to four weeks…..

We started to look at houses to buy over the last six months or so, and I rejected a few because they had no loft. We must have a loft, I declared to Andy – we have so much stuff!

I’ve completely changed my mind now. In fact I never want a loft again – ours had become a tardis for things we hadn’t looked at for nearly five years, things that ‘might be useful’ or worse, things we just couldn’t make a decision on. I am changed. Lofts are not the one.

Anyway, seven years ago, this all seemed a lifetime away, but it’s here and it’s happening (and apparently it’s happening in the snow, with a threat of worse to come……..)