Moving and stuff...

Okay, sorry I've been really bad about updating this lately… Good news, though! We are moving to a bigger place in the Borough of Croydon. From what folks have told me, it should feel a lot like home because the population is dominated by the UK version of hicks and rednecks, though I am doubtful that they know what grits are.

At least the new place is a 3 bedroom house, though the third bedroom is the size of a US closet at 7'5 x 5'10. Also, it has OFF STREET PARKING! Yay! No more fighting for a place to park the wagon, or parking a block away. It still only has one bathroom, though. But it is a bit bigger of a garden for the dogs (though not anything nearing a yard back home). And the train station is right there, so it won't be too bad.

Here's the interesting thing… Apparently, when you rent a property, it is handed to you basically in the condition in which it was left. That is, no one cleans any part of the property. I mean, literally, this place had not been cleaned in years. They put fresh paint on some of the walls (and got it on the carpet), but that was about it. No one ran a vacuum over anything, much less steam cleaned the carpets. I spent a good three hours and 2 bottles of cleaning solution on just the living room floor (only 18' 1 x 10'5) yesterday with our Bissell carpet cleaner thingy, and it still isn't clean. The carpet was originally green, and the places where there was furniture still is green. But there were these warn out, blackened traffic paths that exist because the carpet had never been vacuumed. Well, those bits are now kind of a shade of green, which is pretty impressive. And the toilet… My god! It took Ray 45 minutes just to find the porcelain under all the urine. We have to replace to carpet in the bathroom ourselves because there is no way it can be cleaned. It's not even tacked down at all, and it doesn't meet the wall and if the just the toilet was that disgusting, I don't even want to think about what might be on that carpet… The master bedroom is just as bad, and so is the kitchen. Ok, so, Ray is a clean freak and anyone who knows me knows that I am not anything like that at all. Let's be honest – I am a mess, very disorganized and kinda sloppy. But even I can't live in the place in the condition it is in. I feel like I need a shower just from walking into the house… But this is perfectly normal. This is what people expect to have to do when they rent a house or flat or anything in this stupid, backwards place.