I felt so much better when my house was finally (mostly) free of my parents bits and pieces. Everything was in the Summerhouse, and fairly tidy.
I set off, with my brother, for our next weekend of clearing, and as part of that we took the last of the china to a cafe near my Mum's house. They had been lovely with my Mum when we visited, and they had been so helpful one day when we had a problem. We gave them the china, and the were very happy,.
Our plan for the weekend was to start clearing the cellar, particularly of the out of date products. They used to be good at stock rotation, but when things started to go wrong - my dad losing his sight, for example, it became a small problem. As things deteriorated, it all got a bit out of hand.
I'm tempted to write about Those Cans Of Food, but I won't.
The fridge-that-wasn't incident from a few months ago was a good training run for what we encountered.
Anyway, I'd had enough of the cellar for one weekend, so I was up in the attic, bringing clothes down to go to the Salvation Army banks and to the local charity shops). My brother called for me to come and look at what he had found.
More Colclough china.
Different patterns to the five patterns I'd already sold.
We brought the pieces out and sorted them out into sets.
I messaged my husband, who just laughed.
We did our Salvation Army bank runs, and a run to a Charity shop. And some other runs as well. We've completed 32 full loads now, so we just under 11 skips so far (3 loads to a skip).
We still have no water, but we were prepared this time.
I ended up bringing home 3 full crates, plus another box of jigsaws, plus a small crate of Mums stuff. I hadn't bargained on brining anything back this time.
The journey home was troublesome, the alternator stopped working. DB used to test engines for a living, so he tried all the tricks. We got home in the end, very tired. DH came to pick me up from DB's, and told me to leave the stuff in the car until the morning. Normally I would have disgareed, but I was very tired and desperate for a shower. I had a shower and went to bed.
When I got up the next morning, DH had got the china out of the car and had put it in the dishwasher (on a gentle cycle, with a gentle tablet). He'd also got out the other crates and stacked them.
And so yesterday and today has mainly been about the crate contents.
The good news is that the property is now on the market and we have our first viewing on Wednesday.
I feel like I'm holding my breath.
