More boxes, oh and cakestands

This morning we went to the local car auction – after Popmaster of course 🙂

Dad came along with us and it was very interesting, in a new experience with added people watching point of view. Nothing in our price bracket or right for us – all the vans had only 3 seats and the vehicles which would have been okay for us were going for thousands. Some real bargains there if you were looking for transit vans though. Watching the people was most interesting for me – a real mix of dodgy used car sellers, dealers and people looking for a bargain. I was particularly taken with the forced casualness of some of the bidding, people (almost all blokes) chatting to each other, barely seeming to pay attention to the auction but nodding to raise their bids. Fascinating 🙂

I dropped Ady and Dad back at our house and Dad went off home, Ady spent a couple of hours in the garden tidying it up and the kids and I went to Tasha’s for lunch. She’d been preparing for 2 days baking up a feast – proper gorgeous sandwiches, scones with jam and cream, cookies, pastries and other delights. And tea from a teapot and fancy teacup 🙂 I do love Tasha 🙂

The kids played, although Scarlett spent some time chatting to Tasha about cats and then more time adoring some of Tasha’s 7 cats, while Tasha and I caught up.

Just before 3pm we came home as the letting agent was round at 3pm and I wanted to at least meet her. We got here as Ady was making drinks for her and her trainee who were looking round. Rather oddly the estate agent who came round yesterday said to me ‘I know you’ when I opened the door to him despite me not recognising him at all and this woman said the same. She looked maybe vaguely familiar but I don’t think I know her either. Most strange.

She was very businesslike and insists that the hall, stairs and landing carpet is renewed along with the kitchen floor before it goes on the rental market but reckons she can easily get £975 a month and will rent it easily. They offer rental insurance for non payment and seem generally a lot more professional than Mike -all over it like a rash. Fingers crossed eh?! So tomorrow’s task among others is to get some quotes for that.

We then dropped a carfull of stuff off at a charity shop (the first one we tried refused, they said they were unable to take any donations at all!) before going and sorting out yet more at Mum & Dad’s. I helped the kids who were struggling with getting rid of stuff and we managed to fill 2 more boxes for charity shop, a bag of rubbish and several boxes of things like DVDs and X box games to leave at Mum & Dad’s for some other time. Really hard to know what to do with things like psp / ds game boxes when the actual games are all kept in wallets with the console but in the future they may use the box if they sell the game. So much plastic! Another car full loaded up ready for a charity shop tomorrow which means everything at Mum & Dad’s has now been gone through once and seperated into piles. One to keep there which needs reducing further and one to bring with us which needs packing better. Renting the house rather than selling means soft toys can go back in the loft here again, negating the need for hard emotional decisions but putting them out of sight and mind. Curse Toy Story for giving toys emotions and feelings in kids’ eyes! 😉

Tomorrow we were hoping to see Julie but Maisie is poorly and as we caught both the last two germs we had from them (one in November, one in February) we are not at all up for catching any more so we’ve put that off til next week. So I’ll be baking bread and making pizza dough for dinner and then we’ll be making phonecalls, arranging carpet and doing more box juggling at Mum & Dad’s.