Moving day

Today is the big day, when we finally leave our old flat and move into our new house.

The old place was a big flat by Austrian firm ‘Baumschlager & Eberle’. It was notable for a few things; first it was 27m long which our son loved as it enabled him to race his LikeaBike at great speed. Second, it was pretty open-plan – there was a good 20m long view through the house from the living room. Most of the internal doors were big sliding panels which we kept open most of the time. Third, it was a so called ‘passive house’ though we all hated the distributed air heating system and couldn’t wait to lose its dryer than dry air.

We also leave the centre of a city (Winterthur is Switzerland’s 6th biggest city, though in truth most folk would call it a town) and move to a little village in the country. It’s not the first time we’ve done this but I guess some things will need adjusting for (like the fact there isn’t always a train or bus – we’ll have to plan again).

The removal men arrived at 6:30 this morning and promptly packed their van. They got it all in by 9:30.

Tonight I’ll pick up our son from childcare in central Zurich and go home. I’m expecting boxes everywhere. Tomorrow we fill storage units with the contents of these boxes. Hopefully we’ll get everything apart from a few ‘essential’ items of furniture in the cupboards.

This morning, at the market, I picked up some small Swiss Chard plants and the final herbs for the kitchen garden – now it just needs some beans (we were too late for peas). Tomorrow we need to go again to the garden centre. We have a large section of planting to get done – I thin we’ll get some design help.

First weekend

Well, we have the (new) set of keys and the house to ourselves. It feels slightly weird as we’re now moving from a project to a home. Our son doesn’t want to leave when we visit which I guess is a good sign.

The weekend was a full one. The most important job, one that I decided I could do rather than pay for (on the basis that the builders didn’t want to do it so would have charged a premium), was to seal the grout between all the tiles. It’s not a particularly difficult task, it just takes a lot of time. First I scrubbed the floor with a strong acid-based cleaner, then mopped it all off and then sat, with a fine artist paintbrush, and liberally painted all the lines. Some heavier-use areas will get a second coat (the bathroom already has).

We also visited the local garden centre, who employ some really knowledgeable staff. Given the time we were really interested in getting some herbs and things such as tomatoes that could be planted now, and bags and bags of compost. Yesterday afternoon the spade went in for the first time. I can confirm that under the 10cm of clay which is called ‘topsoil’ we have small rocks. After several hours of rather physical work I realised that the garden is bigger than I had thought (the flat terraced land is about 200 square meters then the rest is made up of slope, paths etc.)

My wife spent Saturday or errands. We collected a parasol from a shop in Zurich, then ordered the table for the garden, then a trip to Ikea for some more ‘Gorm’ units for the storage room – all with a rather frustrated 2 year-old in tow. I’m hoping that the storage room is a decent, stable enough temperature for the wine, otherwise I think there will be wine storage units on the list of things to get.

Le Thoronet

12th Century simplicity…