Treats from home!

I was so excited and got up mega early - today was the day!!!!  Our furniture was finally arriving from Blighty and we couldn't wait!  Well I say finally - we were hoping it would be here for Christmas so it was actually coming a lot earlier than we were expecting - but it couldn't come soon enough!!!  Darren had taken a day off work to help decide where everything would go.  I had visions of him going to work and leaving an empty apartment and then coming home to it fully furnished, but I don't think he trusted me with the interior design!  To be honest I think he was just as excited as I was to see all our stuff again!

They delivery guys were due between 10am and 12pm, but knowing the way things work around here we were expecting to have to chase them at 12pm!  However, they actually turned up at 9.15am - before we were actually ready for them - and they were great!!!  They gave me a list of all the items that had been packed - each one with a number on, and as they brought them in I checked them off!  First off the lorry was Darren's bike and his golf clubs so he was happy from the outset!  And it was all done in about an hour and a half!

I couldn't believe the number of boxes labeled glasses and china - our kitchen wasn't really big enough for all the boxes!  So I quickly tried to unpack them before they brought more in!  Everything went straight into the dishwasher so that I had more room while I thought what to do with them!  We've bought more kitchen stuff since we've been here so we're certainly not short of anything anymore!

We haven't found homes for everything yet and there's been a few cries of 'Where does this live?', but the delivery guys were great and put everything where we asked them, unpacked the big things and assembled everything we needed them to.  They even helped us move some stuff down to the basement where we have a secure cage that we can store things in!  Here are a few piccies of a work in progress.....

There were a couple of casualties - only little things like a glass saute pan lid, a plastic tray and a few scuffs here and there, but overall it's amazing how our stuff has arrived in the same condition as it left the UK after a couple of months on a ship!  A pot of English Mustard leaked which was a shame (didn't get on anything else luckily!), but the coffee, T-bags, salad cream and spicy BBQ sauce made it in one piece!  There were a couple of unexpected surprises too - what looks like a pager which must have belonged to one of the packers, and a spider!  Don't worry, it was dead and I recognise it as a Gloucester one, not one of the dodgy Aussie ones! 

My clothes smelt lovely as I'd put lots of Bounce sheets in the suitcase!  Darren obviously didn't listen to me back home when I told him to do the same with his because he asked me if I'd put some in his when he smelt how nice my case was!  I hate to say 'I told you so!' (but as you can imagine, I did!).

It's so lovely now to have our things - the place is so much more comfortable (although more things to bump into!).  There's still a lot to sort out but it was bliss to sit on the sofas in the evening with some food from the local fish and chippery, a few drinks and then sleep in a bed for the first time this month!  And it was nice to get up in the morning and have a nice cup of coffee in comfort with the sun streaming though the blinds.

Some stuff we're wondering how on earth we've lived without it, and other stuff we're wondering why on earth we've brought it, but it's nice to have our creature comforts again.  Even my grandad's garden gnome is now sat on our decking to enjoy some Aussie life!  It's just a shame we can't ship the people we miss over too!