A new outlook

We were at the estate agents just after 10 am and collected the keys. It was the telling moment when we opened the door and looked at what we had actually bought. I guess everybody must think it, but it does seem ridiculous that we spend such a short time here before deciding to buy. Luckily, it was (almost) as I remembered it. A lot of the walls in the place are sunshine yellow—that will be one of the first things that we have to change—and I would have sworn that the living room was a similar colour. But it’s not; it’s a shade of white.

The first thing that struck us was the smell. The previous owner was a smoker, and I think we are going to have a bit of a job getting rid of the tobacco smell. The next job that we do will be to get a carpet cleaning machine. As always when you move into a new place, you want to clean, and that’s what we spent most of the day doing. PY went into Ryde to see if we could get some foldable beach chairs to use as temporary seating. Given this is a seaside town, we thought that would be easy, but it turns out that it was much harder than you would think. It is off-season. But a couple of chairs were acquired and some coffee from a local café, and we could sit between bouts of cleaning. Possibly the most disappointing find is that the oven is so filthy that I am not sure we will want to use it. We plan on doing some work on the kitchen and maybe the cooker will be the first thing to be replaced. For some reason, there are a lot of cleaning products in this flat already.

Eventually, the pre-booked Argos delivery arrived that brought the bed, bedding, and a small hoover. We opted for some quite cheap things to get started, but these will allow us to stay tonight and also come back next week when we can really start to do more work on the place. After the delivery, we went to Newport to pick up more cleaning materials and to get out and about for a little bit.

We spent our first night by the seaside. I think, when we get over the shock of all the things we need to do, that this will be lovely. Right now it feels very strange.