Comment: The cost of moving house is emotional as well as financial

Household admin is a big old yawn-fest at the best of times, never more so for me than at present.

Because we’re stuck in an interim stage of preparing to leave one house while simultaneously prepping the new place for our arrival, there are constant decisions to be made, all of them tedious (and expensive).

I’ve written in recent weeks about my quest to find a plasterer/electrician/end of tenancy cleaner who’s affordable, available and blessed with good local recommendations, a quest that’s been so time-consuming it’s almost become a job in itself.

And once you’ve got them you need to book them in with some precision so as not to end up with a spotless oven a week before you move out, or freshly-painted skirting boards before the floor’s been sanded.

Availability in general is also an issue; we’re moving a little earlier than expected because that was the only slot our chosen (cheap) removal firm had free.

And even when things seem beautifully aligned, they often aren’t for long. We were counting on a handyman’s help stripping wallpaper and sanding floors over the weekend, but a cold saw him bowing out with an hour’s notice.

Luckily we had a support crew of three junior decorators on hand to step up and sort two rooms.

Turns out stripping wallpaper can take wildly different amounts of time depending on how many layers there are – and exactly what these layers include. The stealthy woodchip was the final nail in the coffin for a weekend spent dealing with kids arguing over wallpaper scrapers, before being banished to sit in camping chairs with iPads.

All of this places the usual household admin on the backburner, so things like eating food that isn’t takeaways or whatever’s lurking at the bottom of the freezer (fishfingers are featuring heavily at present) tends not to happen often.

Here’s to a resumption of regular household tedium in just a few weeks’ time.