Last week: Moving house

It was a long weekend, it poured down for most of it. We had belongings to be collected from 4 different places. It was the longest and dampest move I've ever done, but also amongst the least stressful and least emotionally draining.

New place is a two bedroom flat, which Geoff owns, in the old Sydney suburb of Gladesville.

It's on a ridge above the river, so there's a view of water as I walk home, and views of neighbouring ridges. It's reminded me how much I feel more settles and hopeful when I can see into the distance. I grew up with a view of the Blue Mountains, which mostly explains this desire to be under open skies.

Probably the word that best describes it is 'cosy'. It has enough space for two people, with not much surplus. But you don't feel crowded, probably because of the layout. The internal window between the ktichen nd the living room helps with this, giving a sense of a larger space without the emptiness that can come from open-plan

Storage! omg, the storage. I'm in heaven. There's a pantry(!), a linen press (!) and a garage (!!). I don't think I've had any of those since moving out of home in 2000, except at one place for 1.5 years. Geoff redesigned the kitchen in the flat when he first moved in, and so it also has many useful sized cupboards, and a decent amount of benchspace.

Finally, what surprised me the most about the move was the unpacking. Much of my stuff has been in storage for a year. I moved into a fully furnished place in London for my final 5 months there, and then into a friend's place in Sydney for the past 6 months, and hence didn't require furniture or most of my kitchen items, books, etc. Taking the kitchen things out of a box and placing into cupboards was quite cathartic, like greeting an old part of myself that I'd forgotten about.

Given the amount that I have moved in the last 11 years, my sense of being at home and grounded has always related to the familiar objects around me. Perhaps part of the reason I've been feeling so grey and lacklustre for all these months is because part of me was in a box in a storage unit, not being used.