The new house

This was a move unlike any other. For one thing, we were leaving a flat that was essentially fully furnished so there was very little in the way of furniture to move. And secondly, we left ourselves a full month where we overlapped both properties to avoid having one stressful day in which we had to do everything.

During the first two weeks of March we were preparing the new house. Nina cleaned the kitchen and bathrooms and mopped the hardwood floors which made up the whole lower level. Meanwhile I painted the long wall which ran the length of the living & dining room in the same red as the accent wall in our previous flat. Since we had bought an area rug to match that colour the year earlier, it made sense to keep the same colour scheme in the new place.
We had a field day shopping for furniture and designing the look of our new house. We visited new and second-hand furniture shops in Leicester, Coventry and Northampton picking out the pieces we wanted. By the time we were ready to move in, the only critical piece of furniture missing was our bed.

We found this house at the end of January and viewed it in a hurry one Saturday morning. Our appointment was 1 hour prior to being due at the train station where I was meeting some friends for a trip to Nottingham. We instantly fell in love with the house and expressed interest. The owner, who had renovated the house from being in a derelict state into a modern state-of-the-art house, informed us another offer was coming on Monday. The month of February disappeared amidst the logistics of securing the house and the next time we viewed it was upon picking up the keys. We knew our bed would fit in the bedroom as we had measured it initially. Foolishly, we assumed it would fit up the L-shaped staircase.

In the weeks leading up to the move we brought over boxes and seldom used items. By the time moving day came, there was only one truck load of stuff which was dominated by our super king mattress (essentially 2 metres square). Laurent, a French colleague of Nina’s, and I were doing the heavy lifting and Nina was driving over kitchenware in her car. She was a few minutes behind us and walked in to find the mattress halfway up the staircase with no possible means of getting it to go any direction other than back down again.

The roof deck was a huge selling point for us as we loved the idea of a sun-soaked deck off our bedroom. We didn’t realize how useful it would become until it was apparent that would be the only way to get our bed into the house.
Laurent and I made a trip to the hardware store to buy rope and plastic so we could wrap up the bed and haul it up the side of the house. Once we got it into place and had the lengths of rope tied appropriately, Nina was placed by the mattress with a broom handle. Her job was to guide the bed around the gutter on the side of the house as we lifted from above. At least, this was our plan in theory. In actual fact, we could barely lift the mattress more than a foot off the ground making the gutter issue irrelevant.

Our house is the last one before the plaza starts. The street has been blocked off halfway down the block for traffic calming reasons and a large tree casts shade over the plaza. This makes our block feel like a cul-de-sac and we had been told the neighbours were very friendly. A few of them were on their way out and came across the street to see what was going on. Nina introduced herself and was able to recruit two guys to come up and give Laurent and I a necessary hand. With four men the bed quickly scaled the side of the house and was on the roof in no time. From there it was fairly simple to walk it into the adjoining bedroom.

I think our view of Leicester weather was somewhat jaded by our previous flat. We had a courtyard, but it had walls on all four sides and only received a few short hours of direct sunshine on the best of days when the sun was high in the sky and shining directly down. There was a large garden behind the house which we had direct access to, but in the afternoon it was in the shadow of the house and didn’t seem to be angled well to benefit from the available sunshine.

In contrast, the roof deck in our new house is situated perfectly to take advantage of the sun. It sits at the back of the house and overlooks the neighbour’s small back gardens. We don’t have a garden since our house was once the garden! The house next to ours was a shop on the main floor and the shopkeeper lived upstairs. In 1971 he built a garage in his small garden which became an extension to his house as he made use of the space above the garage to build another room. At some point within the past 10 years the shop closed down and the large house became vacant. In 2008 it was bought, gutted and fully refurbished into 2 adjoining homes. Our living/dining room sits in what was once the garage. In fact, the dip in the pavement in front of the French doors is still there.

So, instead of having a garden, we have a small terrace in front of the home and a deck looking out toward the back. It receives exposure from the south east, south and west and therefore affords sun for the majority of the day on those days we are lucky enough to get any, and recently there have been quite a few. At the right time in the late afternoon, the sun shines directly onto our bed and we had an afternoon kip one Sunday with the door open and the sun shining onto us. Nina found this a bit annoying, but I loved it. It felt like the ultimate in luxury.
We have gotten to know some of our neighbours and they are all friendly and warm. Right across from us are three families with young children. A few houses up lives Moira; the matriarch of the road. She has lived there since before her three grown children were born and knows everyone. In fact, she was the first one we met as she was out walking her dog one evening while we were unloading boxes. And next door to us is a single young guy (probably the only bachelor on the street) named Matt. Once we were settled in Nina baked a batch of cookies and we went round to formally introduce ourselves.

The one issue we have to deal with is that all the local youth walk up and down our street on the way to and from school and then at lunch time. Although they can be a little loud, the issue is more with the litter they drop in front of our house even though there are never less than 3 rubbish bins near by which they walk right past. And regrettably, Nina had one of her plants stolen from in front of our house. She bought 2 buxom bushes for either side of the front door and one morning we came out to find there was only one. We aren’t sure what we can do about these sorts of things. I am thinking of attaching bells to our gate as it might be enough to startle anyone who opens it for nefarious reasons.

I am nearing the end of my second term at university and things are going smoothly. I have my grades from the two classes I took last semester and they both fell within the category of merit. On one of them I was two small percentage points away from distinction which is the highest honour.

I am working my way through the steep learning curve involved inh my thesis project. I have started to play with the hardware I will use to measure the various biometrics of my test participants. The hardware/software is called BioPac and the set the university bought includes various attachments to test EEG (brain activity), EMG (muscle movement) and GSR (skin moisture levels) which are the three I will be using for my project. I filmed a small video while working my through the first EMG tutorial which is quite interesting. You can see it here.

The weather over the past couple of weeks has been unbelievable. We have had countless days where the temperature has been between 18-20 degrees. By the end of the day, the thermometer on our deck is usually in the low 30s as it’s shielded from the wind and makes for a lovely escape at the end of the day. We have also been more adventurous and have wondered out into the country in the car. Last Sunday we drove through a series of small towns and villages north east of Leicester with names like Mountsorrel, Swithland, Newton Linford and Groby. The country estate homes we saw were mind blowing as we meandered our way along the back roads to Swithland Wood. There we walked in the forest and through fields, along the sides of small creeks and by flowering meadows.

That evening we entertained for the first time. Everyone in this neighbourhood seems to know our house as it stands out on the street due to the high level of craftsmanship put into it. Many of Nina’s colleagues have shown interest in coming over to see it. So before heading out for our day in the country, Nina set out to bake cookies and I attended to our first set of religious doorknockers. It was a pair a Jehovah’s Witnesses and I engaged them in a conversation. It became apparent quite early on that they were not going to be able to turn me and kept making excuses to leave. Each time they did I asked them another question which they couldn’t resist staying to answer. When all was said and done they had been on our doorstep for 40 minutes. Having had a very satisfying debate while digesting my morning coffee, I felt content. So we drove into the countryside to enjoy our sunny Sunday.