Moving house guide week 1: Start tackling the mail

So I arrived home from two weeks at my parents to find a pile of letter behind my front door which were a prompt reminder of one of the many tasks I need to face up to for a organised house move.

Mail

Heaven? Maybe not... the Christmas cards that we hadn't received before the holiday were lovely. The bills, well, not so much!

However, this has provided me with an opportune moment to start noting all the people and companies we receive mail from. I've created a page to fill in over the next few months to reduce the pain of changing our address.

Of course you can opt for mail-forwarding by Royal Mail, or the equivalent service in your own country. However, it is not foolproof. Last time we moved, I set up mail-forwarding, paying about £45 for the privilege, only to find that about half of our mail went missing. Luckily for us the people that moved into our old flat sent it to our old letting agency who forwarded it to us, but it included items such as a cheque book! I could not believe that both the bank (who were told 2 weeks before we moved house of our new address) and the post office could mess up so badly! So this time I will be more careful.

This starts  with filling in my mail-tracker sheet for the next 2 months, composing letters 1 month before we move and sending them off 2 weeks before. The bank will be getting a visit from me the week before I move house this time, plus we will have a 10 day overlap on our properties probably, though this isn't confirmed yet. Luckily I'm also friends with my current landlady, so hopefully she will be kind enough to forward things along to me.

Download the House Move: Letter Tracker.

My top tips for tackling the mail forwarding problem are:
1. Write down notes of the company/contact/membership numbers of all incoming mail as soon as you know you will be moving house. Get a copy of my mail tracker here.
2. Identify sporadic mail. Go through filing to identify companies who write to you rarely, such as banks who you only get online statements from.
3. Stop the spam. Stop as much spam as possible, but don't rely on them stopping. Any mail with your name and address on it can potentially be used to steal your identity. So if you receive an item regularly contact the company and ask them to stop sending, but if you still receive the item, accept it and change your address instead.
4. Write letters. About a month before your move write letters to the relevant companies detailing your move date and new address. Print the letters out, put in envelopes, write on the address, but hold off sending until 10 days before your move date. Remember; letters are your friend. They will save you precious time not spent on the phone or in a shop/bank branch in the run up your moving day. Sometimes personal visits and telephone calls are necessary, but most of the time they are not. Mail merging also saves you a lot of time if you know how to set it up and you already have your addresses in a database.
5. Compile lists. Categorise companies who may/will not accept letters as a change of address notification by telephone/email/online and set aside a time in your move-week to tackle this list. It should be minimal as most companies are happy to deal with a letter. However, never trust a bank to do it by letter, always go into a branch if possible. Remember that you may not have a phone line in your new property when you first move in, so try and tackle this before you move rather than after, even if you have been assured by your Utlities company that they will have the phone operational the day you move (in my experience this is very unreliable!).
6. Set up mail forwarding. Once you are between eight and four weeks away from your move date contact your mail forwarding provider. In the UK this is Royal Mail. You can apply anywhere from up to 3 months before your move date, and the sooner you do it, the less there is to worry about it nearer the time. Royal mail need a minimum of 5 working days to set it up.
7. Print forwarding labels. I don't know what other countries are like, but in the UK if you write 'please forward to.... blah blah blah' on an envelope that has been incorrectly delivered and pop it in a post box, unopened, Royal Mail will forward it to the new address. In fact, it is a criminal offence in the UK to 'stop mail being delivered', i.e. if it is delivered to you by mistake and you bin it! In the past if I have moved out of a property and have friends who still live at the address (this happened a lot as a student) I have printed labels with my forwarding address on and given these to my old flatmates when I move out. This way they just pop it on the envelope, over the original address, and the hardest thing for them is popping it in the post box. As we are friends with our landlady we will be using this tactic once again for this move.

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com

Moving house guide week 1: brainstorming

First things first, Happy new year! I hope 2012 didn't treat you too badly and that you are all looking forward to a fresh and exciting 2013. If not, don't worry too much!

As promised earlier in the week I am starting 2013 with my guide to house moving. I'm fairly experienced at moving house, having lived at 6 addresses in 10 years. This should make me a pro right? Far far from it I'm afraid. My moves have gradually become bigger and bigger over the years. Gone are the days where everything fitted in a car (Who am I kidding? My Dad hired a van to take me to University because I had so much stuff!). This time I have a real dilemma as to whether we hire a removal company. Its only a 10 mile move, but we have sooooo much stuff... and a piano. My brother in law has kindly offered his services and assures me that he can move the piano with my hubby, but well, I'm not so sure. That's a bridge to cross in the future.

Anyway, to the move itself. Yes it is 3 months away, but given as how we know it will happen (subject to everything going to plan at least), I'm starting now. However hard a try I always run out of time for packing/planning and there is always a last minute rush! I don't know why, but there is. This year, it will be calm (ahem), planned, and vaguely sensible.

The first thing I am doing, as I have the luxury of time, is a plan. I started by brainstorming all the things I think I need to do/remember/organise before and after moving day. This is the starting point for my plan. Because I'm a jotter and an editor, a cross-er-outer and generally don't like mess, I'm doing this electronically. I have been known to throw away and re-write a perfectly good handwritten list because of typo. So electronic saves me time and sanity. However, please feel free to jot down on a piece of paper; do a brainstorm with a big circle in the middle like you did at school. They really do work!

My brainstorm

My brainstorm started out as above. I'm adding to it... slowly but surely, and no doubt I will continue for at least the next month or so.

I now need to turn this into some sort of plan, organised by time and function. For this I am going to create a special section in my home management binder, or possible in a binder all of itself to keep all house-move stuff together. I haven't quite decided yet. However, at least this lays out where I am right now.

There are two things that I am starting right now, before I finalise the move-plan. Firstly, eating my way through our freezer - there is a lot of food in there! And secondly, writing down every little last bit of post that comes through the door. I'll tell you more about the tactics for handling these two things in the coming days.

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com

Exciting update!

As promised I have a very exciting new update for you all. In 2013 I will own a house for the very first time!

Yes the pass the caffeine household is a-moving! As you may be aware, this was never really our plan. We had grand schemes for buying a plot of land and building a house. Well after a few years of searching the self-build plan has been put on hold for now. It has not completely left the building, just postponed until the time is right. We have come to the conclusion that given our requirements (rural, large plot for growing veg) we need more money, whereas we can buy a house of the spec we like (rural, large plot for growing veg) right now!

Pretty much as soon as we starting looking at houses we fell in love! We have found a house, too far from work (an hours commute - a lot for me!), and far too big (4 bedrooms - oh yes we will need more cats), but we still fell for it. It is 3 miles from the main road, full of peace and quiet (if you ignore the birds), has only 4 neighbours anywhere nearby, and will be ours! I can't wait.

The move-in date has not been finalised as we only agreed a purchase price with the vendors just before Christmas and nothing has happened since, but it is likely to be the end of March to early April. We need to give 2 months notice on our current house, so this is perfect.

In the next few months I will be sharing with you updates on the move, but more exciting still a guide to moving house! Watch this space if you too are moving house in 2013! I'm also interested in knowing the pitfalls anyone has come across in moving house so I can compile as complete a list as possible of tasks, hints, tips and create a foolproof guide to getting one of the worst tasks you'll ever face completed as easily and calmly as possible!

In the meantime, enjoy your new year celebrations! I will be back in 2013 with lots of exciting ideas.

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com

Book review: Nigella Christmas

So I'm back!

Its been quiet around here recently hasn't it? Sorry folks - life just ran away with me there mid-Autumn!

Lets do a quick catch up - Merry Christmas, hope December was great (I had so many ideas that I didn't share with you), and hopefully the New Year is looking good rather than bad.

So here we are. It is nearly 2013, and while I have some exciting news to share with you in the coming weeks, I thought I would start my blog-rejuvenation with a simple book review. I hope you enjoy.

Nigella Christmas - RRP £25.00

I received this book, on request, as a Christmas gift. I'm a big reader of cookery books, and in my opinion Nigella doesn't just write a cookery book but a work of literary foodie heaven. I'm not a big fan of Nigella TV, she talks too much. OK that is a strange thing to say, but basically I don't have time to watch much television and as food programmes go, Nigella's are pretty low down my priority list. However, I can read her books over and over and over! I have 'How to eat' and 'How to be a domestic goddess', both of which I have read more as fiction than as cookery books, and Nigella Christmas sits in much the same category.

There is nothing spectacularly out of the ordinary in Nigella Christmas. The recipes are fairly standard, the prose takes Nigella's normal self-deprecating tone, and in general she uses a fairly good stab at common sense to suggest taking shortcuts where sensible and longcuts where necessary for flavour and good old fashioned eating pleasure. Better still her writing appeals to my sense of 'all out Christmas', even if her decor doesn't quite:

"The fresh snowfall of icing sugar on top might seem seasonal enough, but not for me. So I add some edible glitter in Disco Hologram White."

- Christmas Rocky Road

Yup. That's my kind of Christmas decorating. 

Another wonderful aspect of Nigella's approach to Christmas is summed up by the recipe 'Fully loaded potato skins'. Potato skins? Christmas? Not an obvious combination, but fully loaded, oh my, yes please! Recipes are quick(ish), given what they are producing, and  pretty much always sound appealing. There is a vast array, all the way from really simple party food (potato skins please!) to the full Christmas day roast. 

Nigella also sets out a Christmas day time-plan which is essential for any first-timer to the Christmas rush. It should help anyone trying to impress their mother-in-law for the first time, as the advice is simple and neatly laid out. The key ingredient is learning to write your own plan, which Nigella advocates time and again.

OK, so there is nothing amazingly new, astonishing or just completely off the wall. This is not a book for a culinary genius to find new ideas. But with the name 'Nigella Christmas' I hope you knew that already. One downside to all of Nigella's cooking is that I think that anything she does not cook regularly herself could do with more kitchen testing. For example I made some of the cocktails and I have to admit, they didn't do much for me! The bread sauce however is simple to prepare and divine in texture and flavour. The layout is easy to understand, is peppered with 'Nigella prose', and lots of hints and tips on making ahead, freezing and time-saving tips. I think Christmas in the Nigella household would taste wonderful!

In summary - if you are a chef, don't bother. If you aspire to cook, fail completely but like a good read, then this is for you. If you are in the middle, take it if you are a cookery book addict (ahem, thats me then), or leave it if Nigella's style does not appeal.

I'll just leave you with the image of me drooling over the pages. 

Happy (belated) Christmas.

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com

What to do with old magazines

In my decluttering (that I'm still failing at, but desperately trying to progress in), I have come across literally hundreds of magazines that we no longer have a need for. Some Loads of them even moved house with us last autumn and have been sat in cupboards/under the bed looking lost and unloved. Certainly more than we could reasonably expect to use in lighting the fire anyway (have you noticed that magazine paper is not exactly wonderful for lighting things - total fail here as we don't read newspapers). 

So what do we do with them? Certainly they won't get chucked in the bin! In the PTC household throwing anything away that is at least recyclable, and quite possibly reusable is a deadly sin. The few magazines that have interesting items in have been torn up and the key pages kept in punched pouches (I'll do another post on this at some point), but the rest, well we just aren't interested in anymore. So in an attempt to find a use I've done a little bit of googling and come up with a list.

For some great quilling ideas visit Crafting Creatures.

1. Give the magazine away. See if you have a friend that is interested in the content, or perhaps a GP surgery/dentist/hairdresser. All are in need of a little it of paper to entertain their clients. We have the problem that our science and car (why do we have car magazines?) aren't really appropriate for that sort of audience. So we tried freecycle as well, what school-kid isn't interested in a bit of science?

2. Make quilling strips! Quilling paper is expensive, but nothing could be easier (or more tedious perhaps), than making your own quilling strips. Cut them up with a pair of scissors to the width you want and quill away. Alternatively, put them through a straight-cut shredder (not the fancy kind that cross shreds!). You won't have lovely neat edges but you will get strips really quickly.

Create paper decorations: paper star by House Revivals. 

More paper decorations - try magazine-origami. 

3. Make a scrap book. Cut up all your favourite pictures/tidbits from the magazine and scrap scrap away! That way you don't loose the content you are interested in, but you don't have to wade through an entire magazine, that to be honest you will never do, to find the one item that really interests you!

Make a paper star.

4. Make decorations. This couldn't be easier; cut strips/shapes in all the colours of the rainbow from your vast collection of magazines and be inspired. Pinterest of course is full of inspiration, just search for hand made paper decorations. The limit is endless. Try origami or just good old fashion play around!

5. Use to line envelopes - or indeed make envelopes! For an envelope tutorial visit frugalliving.

6. Decoupage - the options are endless. For a simple how-to visit bhgscrapbooksetc.com.

7. Wrap presents. Oh the options for this are endless. Black and white pages look classic, but the colourful just look fabulous! 

8. Cover boxes/canisters in old pages. These from trash2treasure look simply fabulous! I mean why wouldn't you want to do this?

Cover coffee canisters/boxes with scraps.

Rolled magazines into a reed box.

9. Roll up some pages and make a box or something similar! OK, so you could do this the easy-but-flimsy way, where you follow a tutorial meant for card and et voila! one flimsy box. But oh no. There is a better way; try making 'magazine boxes' with The Artful Crafter. These are truly beautiful. Then there is the stunning reed box, colour coorindated too (so you'd need to spend some time seraching the pages for the right look) with craft stylish.

Rolled magazines into boxes.

10. And finally, if in doubt, recycle! Everywhere now has paper recycling, so please if you run out of enthusiasm for crafting, then give a tree a bit of extra life by putting your paper in your recycling box.

There are tonnes of ideas out there, and these are just a few that appealed to me. 

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com

Random wordings

I read this fascinating article this morning on the use of British English in America. Apparently it isn't going down well in some areas. Funnily enough the same thing erupted here a few years ago with the large amount of American sitcoms on British TV being blamed for the change in British English. I'm not entirely sure what all the fuss is about to be honest. Language is language. It evolves and changes with the times. If it doesn't, it turns into the dreaded Latin lessons at school - a language you are taught but will never speak. What is the point of that?

So instead of complaining bitterly about the change in our use of language (whichever part of the world you are in - after all Ching-lish is supposedly spoken by more people now than English, or at least according to QI, the source of all knowledge!), I thought I'd share with you some of the words that I love and hate.

Words I love

• Train station - an American term, that is oh so much shorter and sweetie than railway station.
• Ginger - to indicate someone who has red hair. Often used in a derogatory sense, but often not. I just love it. I love gingers too (living in Scotland and having a family half-full of red heads might have something to do with that). I think I have ginger envy.
• Bi-weekly - ok so not right up there on my 'love-list' but what is so wrong with this? Much more descriptive than fortnightly. I'm not saying fortnightly should be abandoned, but what is wrong with a new and highly descriptive phrase?
• Closet - I've been using this a lot recently to describe any cupboard/wardrobe or such in our house which needs decluttering or some sort of attention. Mr PTC hates it! I love it because it is all-encompassing (hmmm maybe I should embrace more words that I don't like because they are all-encompassing too).

... and the words I loathe

• Pleb - seriously? this is just derogatory and unnecessary. Especially when used by politicians to refer to anybody they believe isn't on the same payscale as them.
• Ned - used in Scotland to refer to people who are from Glasgow and just a bit, erm, uneducated. Pleeeeeeaaaaassssssseeeeee. Just because you have a Glaswegian accent doesn't make you uneducated.
• Brummie - used in the posh parts of middle England to refer to anyone with a Birmingham accent, in a not very nice way. This was one of the things I really hated about where I grew up - everyone was so stuck up about not being from Birmingham. I mean does where you grow up really make you a better human being? I think not!
• Eaterie - now come on. What is wrong with restaurant, takeaway or pub? 
• Math. I'm sorry, but as a Mathematical Physicist I cannot understand the word math. It is MATHS plain and simple. Maybe this makes me grumpy; I don't know why but it really sets my teeth on edge.

OK, and one more thing, that while not really getting upset about I just don't understand. Why do American's refer to themselves as American-English, or American-Swedish or whatever? I mean I'm Scottish or British no Scottish-Irish-Welsh-English-Norwegian-Danish which is probably more accurate if you take into account the previous 10 generations which is what I believe American's do. I really don't understand! I'd love to be enlightened.

Phrases and words that are British and American, but all just quite fascinating.

Feel free to disagree or (strangely) agree with me. I think one of the most wonderful things about language is its ability to change, evolve and grow. The fact we can be so diverse in our choice of how we explain something is wonderful. So maybe I sound grumpy by having things that I don't like, but this just makes life more exciting surely?

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose,

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com

To crochet or not to crochet?

I've been sick and off work the last two days. I hate being sick (OK thats a really stupid thing to say). It is so boring! I end up checking my work emails anyway (then feeling guilty because I haven't done anything and falling asleep because I'm so tired). What I have done though in between my sleeping and email sessions is crochet! 

I've been wanting to learn to crochet for a while. I tried my hand at knitting a few years ago, but I never created anything I deemed exciting enough to be worth the effort. Oh and I wasn't good at it, in fact I was pretty terrible at knitting (obviously the housewife gene didn't get passed on). But crochet seems simpler and more fun. Plus I have a theory that I can do it while watching TV on cold winter evenings, although I'm a long way from that at the moment. Mr PTC thinks its a passing phase - we will see.

So between being ill, and completely useless at self learning I have eventually gotten around to finishing my first crochet project. Small, simple and rather cute:

A crochet rose.

A small simple crochet rose-type flower. I'm actually quite impressed by myself. I swear it TOTALLY looks better in real life than in the photo. Ahem.

I can't tell you how long it took because there have been a large number of naps taken between miniature crochet session. Lots of cups of tea, and lots of snuffling. If you want to have a go yourself I used the following tutorial and I highly recommend it:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94vYpcZ3W64

Happy crocheting to anyone who wants to give it a go.

I'm linking up to....
A Bowl Full of Lemons
Not just a housewife

Thanks for stopping by,

Rose,

Let me know what you think... leave a comment or send an email to passthecaffeine {at} gmail {dot} com