It's starting to hit home that we're leaving now after a busy weekend inventorying, packing, and selling.

We're not actually shipping that much to Oz in terms of furniture, but our personal items alone equate to half a shipment crate (roughly £1500). For a while now, I've been using www.listal.com to catalogue our DVD's and books - mainly DVD's up until now. But as we're shipping all our books we made the effort to inventory every single book prior to packing them - coming to a grand total of 597! Listal makes it easy though. All you need to do is enter the ISBN number off the book and it fills in all the details for you by interrogating Amazon. It even includes a photo of the book cover.

Rach and Lauren were busy emptying and cleaning the cupboards and choosing what we're going to sell on the car boot sale next Sunday. Rach as introduced a great scheme involving chore charts and stars to motivate Lauren to be good and help out. If she gets the required number of stars in a week we give her £2. She's taken to it with great gusto (see pic below).

We had mixed success with the sale on ebay. The sofa didn't sell during the auction but just after the auction ended someone contacted us making a lower offer. We accepted it. They've got a real bargain there but I'm not too bothered as we got a good 7 years out of it. The table and chairs didn't sell though so we're going to plan B - putting them up for sale in the local paper. Our TV cabinet didn't sell either but I'm quite glad really - what would we put our TV on between now and leaving?? Our book cabinet did sell but I'm still waiting for the buyer to contact me to arrange a pick-up.


The big milestone was that we signed the contract to exchange ownership of the house at the weekend and we've been given an indicative completion date of the 10th May. We're now deliberating whether to hang around until June as previously planned or just go straight away. After all, it's been a long time coming and from the 10th May there will be nothing stopping us.

There's still a million and one things to do though. We've hardly touched the to-do list.