19 minutes a day? I don't think so

So it turns out that the 19 minutes a day is totally unachieveable, at least in this house. We let it get far too squalid over the last few weeks, and 19 minutes barely makes a dent. It took me 45 minutes in the bathroom alone! I think that plan is only for people who already have a sparkling clean house, and possibly a maid.

I did make a dent on the packing, though, albeit a small one. Yesterday I looked on the internet for self-storage places locally, and found Belfast Self Storage just a couple of miles up the motorway from here. I nipped round yesterday morning and got a selection of boxes and some packing tape. Since then I have filled five boxes with books, one with bed linen and blankets, and one with childhood memorabilia that I'd be really sorry to lose.

By that point it was becoming obvious that I had more boxes than would fit in my car to take back to the storage facility, but there may be a solution to that as well. Pickfords had seen that I submitted a request for storage information on their site, and phoned to get more details from me. We are most likely going to go with them for shipping to New Zealand, and it turns out that they can also collect boxes now and store them for us until we're ready to leave. A rep is coming over next week to look at how much we have in the house that will be coming with us, and go through our options. It would be so handy to have someone just come and take the stuff rather than having to hire a Man with a Van to ferry it about. I'll wait and see what their prices are like, but this is promising.