137) Getting Ready to Move to Australia

On 12th Sept 2002 we and Murray and Linda signed the agreement of sale for the house. We fixed 15th November as the transfer date and agreed to waiver any occupational rent so that the sale would go through quickly and smoothly. We had two months to get all our arrangements finalised and so we knew that we could not dawdle but had to get started.

While waiting for the bank to approve Murray’s loan we got in touch with some removal companies to get quotes to take our furniture to Australia. We knew that we wanted to take personal things like books, photos, tools and things so we decided that if we were going to need a removal firm we might as well take our furniture as well. There were some things that were really too old and worn to be worthwhile taking so we had to sort things out and make some decisions. I think the contents of the house were easier to make decisions on, I either wanted it or I didn’t. It was much harder for Jonny with all the things he had in his workshop. He would have liked to have kept everything but even he could see that a two-meter long heavy-duty steel worktable was too big and cumbersome to take with us and it had to go. Also the removal companies told us that everything had to be perfectly clean for us to take it into Australia. The young lady who came to give us the quote said that it would not be worth our while to take garden tools. They would have to be scrubbed and painted and the customs department would probably put them into quarantine when our goods arrived in Australia as garden tools were notorious for carrying germs and fungus and other nasties that they did not want us to take to their country. All Jonny’s tools would have to be cleaned and some of them given a coat of paint before we could pack them into the container. There was just so much to do, Jonny employed the husband of our neighbour’s maid to help him, get all the work done. His new assistant was called Petros and was a great help to him even though it did not look like it at times. I would take them morning tea in the workshop and they would be sitting sorting the “junk”. They had three different piles, one for things that were ready to be packed, one for things that were going to be packed but needed to be mended, cleaned or painted before they could be packed. Then there was the smallest pile of all, the one that held the things that were going to be either thrown out or sold. Jonny has always been a bit of a “collector” and does not like to get rid of all his old things. Petros was really not the best assistant for him as Petros also liked to keep things so would often transfer things from the “Out” pile into the “To be cleaned” pile. They seemed to spend all their time talking about the things Jonny had collected, how long he had had them, where they had come from and who had given them to him but they eventually got everything sorted and packed so they must have got through quite a bit of work while they talked.