Over the past 3 and a half years I have been away from home (my home country India), I have been trying to create a home in the UK. This will be my 7th moving-home endeavour here in such a short span of time which makes my average time spent in one house just 6 months. The crucial point is that in this country, moving house every 6 months is not only exorbitant, but also comes with a lot of stress. The main stress is to find out a decent house which also fits in the budget. Some logistic specifications that we have, which makes the choice more difficult than usual, are as follows –
1. It should not be an open plan kitchen because in Indian cooking the smoke can bother the guests sitting in the living room
2. The cooker should preferably be gas instead of electric because it is difficult to make chapattis on an electric cooker
3. It should be a 2 double bed house with the second room being fairly good size and not a study (so that when our parents come over from India, they have a decent night sleep)
4. As per Vaastu the direction in which the front gate opens and where the kitchen and bathrooms are in the house, all play important roles
5. Just the feel that I get when I enter the house should be positive and welcoming (actually I have rejected quite a few because of not meeting this criteria)
Now you can imagine, with such specific requirements (some of which we are scared of even mentioning to the English agents around), finding the right place becomes a nightmare. And even if such places exist, making sure they fall in our budget makes it a rarity. Then the stress does not just get over yet, even by luck if you do manage to find the ideal house to move out, the whole process of shifting is a nightmare. I am a person who likes spending a lot of time planning and organising a smooth shifting. I like making sure that the D-day of moving out is not over packed with –
a) lots of packing to do, b) loading all the stuff into the van, c) unloading them from the van, d) unpacking all the stuff in the new house and e) designing the new house
Therefore, to make this transition smooth, I start the process of moving out one month in advance, with every weekend being like baking only one slice of a big cake. This weekend is about packing books while in the process identifying those to be marked for charity. We have already achieved this target, so I moved the target forward to include also identifying clothes to be marked for charity so that we could go and do all the charity submissions in one go instead of having to go twice. I have just given myself a break to write down this blogpost, but seems like we will achieve this target very soon as well. So I need to quickly think of another stretch target – hopefully I will not end up packing the whole house one month in advance of the actual day! This only remains to be seen. But you can sense the hard work we do during this process and moving almost every 6 months is not something I fancy anymore.