Nov 21- Moving In

Today we moved into our house at 15 Wamil Way, Mildenhall, Suffolk IP28 7JU. We woke up at 9am and began packing our hotel room up like crazy. I was so excited to get out of the hotel room and into our cute little home that I could barely sleep last night. I woke up at 8:30 before hearing Kevin’s alarm clock in the living room, where he’s been sleeping on the hide-a-bed. (He was so crowded in the little bed they claim is made for two…they must be talking about 2 children…that he moved out into the living room the second week in our hotel room). Anyway, at 10 am, we rushed out the door, cashier’s check in hand, to begin our life out in the world of the British.

Signing the lease agreement went fairly smoothly. Our estate agent was gone on holiday and so Jenny, the secretary, helped us. She did a fabulous job, but she didn’t know the details of the property…like where the shed key is, or why we only got one set of keys instead of two or where the gas and electric meters are so that we could read them and call the company with our details. Regardless, we signed the paperwork and walked the short distance, past beautiful St. Mary’s church, to our new home.

Weslee and I stayed at the house to begin cleaning it up while Kevin went back to the hotel room to bring all of our stuff to the house and check out. While here, we discovered that our landlord isn’t too keen on cleaning. The walls are freshly painted. The floors were mostly clean…but several of her little knick knacks were laying about and when we opened up the pantries and cupboards, there was a thick layer of dust and crumbs. Nasty!!! We spent most of that first night sweeping out the dust, washing out drawers, and wiping down shelving. The nice thing is that she doesn’t expect us to white-glove clean the house when we leave. I could NEVER leave the cupboards and drawers looking like that…but it’s at least nice to know that we won’t have to pull an all-nighter scrubbing every little smudge off of the walls like at our last place.

After a while, Kevin showed up with the rest of our stuff. Weslee and I went out to meet him and to help him unload. As I approached the front door to bring some things in…Click! The wind blew the self-locking door shut. I could see my keys…the only set of keys…laying peacefully on the kitchen countertop. We had been in our house less than 2 hours and already we were locked out in the freezing cold.

At this point, I began to panic because we were expecting the military to deliver all of our appliances any time this afternoon and they were expecting our house to be unlocked. If they couldn’t deliver our household appliances today, we’d have to wait until at least Monday, if not later. I decided to return to the estate agent’s office to see if anyone had any more keys. As I walked the 5 minutes to their office, I thought of how much worse the situation could have been. Weslee could have been locked inside. I could just picture him standing at the door screaming and having no way to reach him. I counted my blessings even as I continued to panic.

When I got to the office, they tried every phone number they had to reach the landlord…with no luck. I was wringing my hands. My husband and son were stuck out in the cold or at best, jammed in the front seat of the car with all of our stuff. It wasn’t a situation that would accommodate them for any length of time.

Just then, Jenny the secretary remembered that our landlord had left a key with her friend who did house repairs. His wife, Angela, worked just across the street at a travel agency. As luck would have it, Angela was there and was able to help us as soon as her coworker got back from lunch.

Kevin was a total gentleman and had me wait in the car with our sleepy boy on my lap while he braved the cold for our 20 minute wait. It seemed like forever. The car was warm, but I kept looking out the window at my husband in his thin hoodie pulled up over his ears, arms pulled back into the sleeves trying to look like he didn’t mind the frosty wind much. He finally climbed on top of our shed where the neighbor’s garden wall blocked most of the wind.

Angela finally showed up. We finally got inside our house again. And life went on. We opened a letter from our landlord, Patricia, welcoming us to our new home and telling us the history of the place. And, it held the long lost shed key that poor Jenny didn’t know about earlier. We figured out how to light the boiler and heat the house. The military showed up with our appliances and were able to install them all. Life settled down and we cooked dinner.