Thursday 5 July 2012

Houseless, but certainly not homeless.

We’ve finally done it! We handed the keys in to the estate agent last Wednesday and we have survived a whole week of van dwelling.
So far, so good! We’re still in a state of organised chaos, well our van is a bit of a mess.  We are missing our kitchen unit (a promise from a friend fell through), lacking a few cupboards, plastic boxes and storage space (a job for next month’s wage) and I appear to have enough clothes to open my own branch of ‘Go Outdoors’! A job for tonight is to go through our clothes and decide what we really need...that fancy dress bag is really going to have to go into storage!
After 3 days of cleaning last week, seriously it’s the hardest I’ve ever worked in my life! We were on pins as to whether or not we would get our ridiculously large deposit back from our rental house we were moving out of. It wasn’t just the money that was important to us, but the fact that it is our security net. If we need to move back into a house at short notice or the van decides to break down, then we should have £1050 in our savings account to fall back on. The good news arrived on Saturday as I listened to a voicemail from the estate agent informing us after the Landlords inspection we were getting our full deposit back and it should be with us within seven working days. This in itself is a massive achievement and if you have dogs you will know how much hassle it can be to try and rent a house and the assumptions behind having dogs in a rented property...funnily enough neither of our dogs did eat any of the house!
Our first week in the van has been pretty uneventful and we are really looking forward to getting organised and settling in more. I think my most interesting moment this week is now having the ability to ‘wee’ standing up. I have invested in a Shewee extreme (http://www.shewee.com/) and it has been a complete revelation. It was hard to overcome the psychological barrier of opening the flood gates whilst stood up, but I’m getting there slowly and it is really quite liberating not having to squat and bare my bum to the world!