We’re finally unpacked! Most of the boxes are gone. We can (mostly) find everything and we are ready for visitors which is just as we’ll as the have some friends coming to stay on Friday.

In the end we have split the collection between a bedroom and the cellar. The landlord came to look at the water in the cellar and decided it was simply due to the change in temperature as the house is new and hasn’t been lived in before. We’ve had a dehumidifier running for three weeks and its thankfully dried out. It was enough to panic Scifiwife hubby though so all paper based collectibles and the statues are in my office and the ‘toys’ etc are in the cellar.

My office

The man-cave

Scifi hubby has spent the last three weeks unwrapping the collection which has been a traumatic experience to say the least. He has now found everything but we had a week when he raced around like a headless chicken as he remembered something else that he hadn’t seen yet. He would be happily unpacking a box of books when he would suddenly shout ‘BATARANGS’ and then fly around the house looking in every box until he found them. Now bear in mind that there we 381 boxes so this whole process could take some time and for some reason seemed to mostly start at 11pm. In fact it took three days to find the batarangs with lots of swearing, complaints about removal men and pathetic random cries of ‘batarangs’ like a small child looking for a lost toy.

Meanwhile I unpacked the whole of the rest of the house, sorted the food shopping, cooked meals oh and started my new job. I’d get pulled into the occasional batarang hunt but it seemed my lines of ‘it will turn up once you’ve unpacked everything’ were more like a red flag to a bull than helpful.

We were really lucky in terms of damage and loss. The only thing that is completely missing is the digital TV box which is easy to replace at least. From a house perspective there’s a broken clock, broken radio and damaged computer speakers. From the collection there was one painting with broken glass but no damage to the painting and four damaged books. That’s it! No broken statues, smushed comics, damaged paintings, lost autographs or batarangs. Well done removal men. Now we’ve just got to hope that the insurers understand the value of books as it is, predictably, four hard to get hold of books that are battered.

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Wampa update – we remembered to collect him from the old house and he has now taken up residence in our new fridge along with Luke and Han Solo. There’s almost more toys than food in the fridge now…

Moving house is always difficult. Packing, labelling, loading, driving, unloading, unpacking, working out where to put everything, finding the missing screws for the bed, hunting for the power cables, trying to stop the cat escaping back to the old house the list goes on and on. Throw in 38 degree temperatures and a HUGE batman/comic collection and you’ve got a recipe for a very stressed Scifi hubby.

He barely lets me into his ‘office’ and the cat is banned completely so imagine his face as five removal men descended on Monday and “manhandled” all of his preciouses into boxes. To be fair to the removal men they were very careful, used several trees of tissue paper and enough bubble wrap to keep the whole of the city of London in ‘stress bubble paper’ for several years. All the boxes have ‘fragile’ and ‘this way up’ stickers and there was no nasty crashing noises. I guess the proof will be in the unwrapping…

We have 381 packages of stuff. Yes really. At a rough estimate over half of this is his collection which partly says he has a lot of stuff and partly shows how the removal men have wrapped each Batman so well that you only get six into each box. The removal guys have two wagons; a small one which seemed to have all our household furniture and boxes in and a huge shipping container on wheels which seems to mostly contain Batmen.

We had planned on putting most of his office into the basement of the new house but we opened the doors last night to discover it the cellar was damp. He’s now trying to work out how to get all of his stuff into one of the bedrooms. The floor space is actually slightly bigger than he had before but the ceiling slopes so he’s lost of lot of storage space up two walls. I think it will all fit but its a bit like a giant Tetris puzzle at the moment.

We still need to go back to the old house to do some final cleaning and give the keys back to the landlord. Just as well really as I’ve realised that we left the Wampa and Luke in the fridge!