Our first day at Everstead involved wrong keys, mystery furniture, abandoned toiletries, cupboards full of half-used food and a corner sofa that refused to enter the lounge.
The Grand Arrival
There is, apparently, a version of moving day where you arrive at your new home, clutch the keys, take the obligatory photo outside the front door and then actually go inside…We managed the photo.
Big cheesy smiles. Keys held up. Very look at us, homeowners.
Then the key labelled front door didn’t open the front door. Fine.
We tried the back door….That one didn’t work either.
Now, not that I’m one to panic… much…*eye roll* but having just legally acquired a house and then discovering you can’t actually get into it does take the shine off things slightly.
Thankfully, Joel remembered the previous owners had given us two sets of keys.
Cue me rummaging through the depths of my handbag and eventually finding one labelled porch. Eureka!
We were in.
Everstead’s first act as our forever home was, naturally, to lock us out.And somewhere in the middle of all this, the movers had already phoned to say they were early and had left the big furniture in the garage.
So, having finally managed to enter the house we now owned, we could begin the relaxing business of moving furniture back out of the garage and into it.
Apparently Owning the House Was the Easy Bit
Once we were finally inside, the first job was to make sure the furniture we had bought from the previous owners had actually stayed put.
Most importantly, the huge dining table and chairs. Present and correct. Fabulous.
There were also a few extra bits of furniture we had neither paid for nor requested, which was… generous, I suppose.
Then came the furniture the movers had left in the garage (as they decided to show up an hour early and we had only just left court!) So we spent the next while hauling that back into the house before getting Young Miss’s room set up. She was due back from sports club later and I knew she would want to inspect her new kingdom immediately.
Joel then went off to collect our trusty Evie van and begin the evacuation of approximately twenty years of my life from the boxes I had stacked in his dining room, plus the rest of his things, while I stayed at Everstead and started unpacking.
Music on. Windows open. Boxes everywhere.
It was also the middle of a heatwave.
So I was sweating my way up and down the house carrying labelled boxes and trying to remember which door led to which room.
At some point, while lugging another box upstairs, I had a sudden flashback to the five-storey Victorian townhouse we had nearly bought.
Four people. One cat. Five floors. Me and Joel doing the move ourselves. In August.I think that may actually have finished me off.
For once, Everstead’s comparatively sensible number of stairs felt like one of the best decisions we had made.
The Kitchen Had Other Ideas
I started in the kitchen, which seemed sensible enough.
Then I noticed the smell.
At first I assumed something slightly questionable had travelled with us in one of the boxes.
Nope.
It was the cupboards….And the drawers.
All of them, apparently.
A sort of strange musty smell that seemed to have settled into every available surface.
Fine. Annoying, but fixable. We had enough cleaning products between us to sterilise a minor operating theatre, so I got to work wiping out every sticky drawer and cupboard before putting the essentials away.
Then I opened a few more cupboards and discovered that the previous occupants had also left us a selection of half-used bottles, tins and assorted mystery condiments.
Lovely. More bin bags.
There is something very intimate about inheriting somebody else’s open sauces that I had not previously considered.
To be fair, they had also left us a fridge containing various bottles of wine and caffeine-free Diet Coke…So, swings and roundabouts.
Once the kitchen was vaguely clean, vaguely functional and no longer full of somebody else’s dinner plans, I moved on to the rest of the house box by box.
Apparently This Was Ours Too
Once the kitchen was under control, I moved on to the rest of the house.
Which is when I started discovering just how much of the previous occupants’ lives had remained behind.
The bathroom greeted me with an old toothpaste-covered glass, toothbrushes, and various half-used bottles of shampoo and body wash.
Great! More bin bags.
And then there was the furniture.
Little bits here. Random bits there. Things we definitely had not bought and definitely had not asked them to leave.
So, naturally, a pile began to form.
The official Everstead collection of what the fuck do we do with this?
Some of it looked potentially useful. Some of it very much did not.But all of it had somehow become our problem.
At this point I was beginning to realise that moving into a house isn’t just about bringing your own belongings in.
Sometimes it’s also about discovering which parts of somebody else’s life have quietly been promoted to yours, whether you like it or not!
And Then There Was the Yellow
Somewhere in the middle of all this, I properly looked at the dining room.
We had obviously seen it before. Several times, in fact.
But somehow, during the viewings, the colour hadn’t seemed quite so… aggressive.
Now, with the previous owners’ belongings gone and the room standing there in all its naked glory, there was no avoiding it.
It was yellow. Not tasteful mustard. Not warm ochre. Not soft golden sunshine. Migraine-inducing banana bloody yellow. I am not, in any way shape or form, a yellow sunshiney person.
The huge dining table I loved was still there, thankfully, but now it appeared to be sitting inside the world’s largest banana.
Immediate mental note: this was going to have to change.
Exhibit B: apparently we had bought a dining room sponsored by a highlighter pen.
The Sofa Had Other Plans
It was around half past twelve.
We had owned Everstead for roughly two hours.
Naturally, this was when the sofa arrived.
This was the one genuinely new piece of furniture we had bought for the house, so I was very excited to see it finally turn up.
The delivery men were lovely, friendly, chatty, and immediately set about hauling the various sections into the lounge while I sensibly stayed out of the way.
Then came the words nobody really wants to hear from a furniture delivery man.
“Err… excuse me…”
Yes, my good man?
“Well… erm… this bit doesn’t fit.”
Fuck.
The actual corner section of the corner sofa would not make the 90-degree turn through the dining-room and lounge doorframes.
They tried.
And tried.
And tried again.
All of this in Sahara-adjacent August heat.
Eventually they had to concede defeat.
The corner unit was not going into the lounge.
They did suggest it might go through the window, which sounded promising for approximately three seconds until we remembered that the lounge window was, of course, the only window in the bloody house that didn’t open.
So the orphaned corner section was left sitting in a corner.
Of the dining room.
And I sat on one of the sofa sections that had successfully made it into the lounge, sweating quietly, wondering what on earth I was going to do now….so I did all i could, I shoved the two bits that did fit together to make the best of it…not quite the family of 5 corner unit I had pictured. But oh well! At least we could sit.
Young Miss Arrives
But it was fine.
Young Miss was due home soon and I was fairly certain the sight of her new room would restore some order to proceedings.
Now, I will admit, the furniture we had bought from the previous owners for her room was a bit… erm… not exactly tweenager chic.
But it was practical. A small wardrobe. Drawers for the approximately nine hundred items of clothing she owns. And, most importantly, a gorgeous double bed with what was basically a brand-new mattress.
At the old house she had only had a single, so this felt very exciting.
I’d put on the new topper I’d bought, made the bed with the fresh bedding she had chosen herself, and stood back thinking she was going to be thrilled.
I was wrong. Very, very wrong.
Just before I went to collect her, I got a text from her friend’s mum asking if she wanted a sleepover. Perfect.
She could come back, grab her things, show her friend the new house, and then head off for the night while Joel and I finished sorting the chaos.
That was the plan.
She arrived, went upstairs, took one look at the top floor she had previously been thrilled about…and decided she absolutely, positively could not live there. Then burst into tears.
Her friend, standing in the doorway, helpfully added: “I don’t blame you, Tilly. I wouldn’t live here.”
Excellent. Always nice to get an impartial second opinion. *eye roll*
By this point I was exhausted, emotionally spent and approximately one inconvenience away from my third breakdown of the day.
It was only 3:30pm.
So naturally, this was the moment I had to break the news that we also had no internet and probably wouldn’t have any for another day or two. Young Miss took this exceptionally well. By which I mean the volcano of rage finally erupted.
There was outrage. There was flouncing. There was a dramatic exit from Everstead, apparently never to return.
Great.
We had owned the house for about five hours….and things were going swimmingly.
Fine. We’ll Just Go to Bed Then
So I took Young Miss and her friend back to her friend’s much nicer, normal house where they had internet and trudged back to Everstead.
By this point, what little joy I had left had been unceremoniously sucked out of me.
I had imagined our first afternoon in the new house involving excitement, wandering around, maybe a drink, maybe some sentimental nonsense.
Instead I had been locked out, scrubbed out someone else’s cupboards, inherited several unwanted possessions, watched a sofa fail to enter the lounge, and been informed by a child that our new home was essentially uninhabitable.
Still, at least it was only mid-afternoon.
Joel was still doing the final Evie van runs, bringing back the last of my stuff from his place and adding it to the ever-expanding garage situation.
Eventually, somehow, we stopped.
We sat down.
Properly sat down.
No boxes in our hands. No furniture being moved. No child declaring the house unfit for human habitation.
Just us.
And then we remembered we still had no internet.
Of course we didn’t.
No TV. No TikTok. No mindless scrolling. No background noise. No modern little electronic anaesthetic to take the edge off the day.
By about 9pm we looked at each other and reached the same conclusion.
Fine.
We’ll just go to bloody bed then.
There had been no graceful wandering from room to room, no celebratory drinks, no peaceful settling in.
There had been wrong keys, mystery furniture, abandoned toiletries, a violently yellow dining room, one sofa section in exile, one furious child and absolutely no internet.
But we were in.
Somehow, among all the boxes and chaos, Everstead was ours.
Home sweet home…ish.
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