Our New Flat

When we arrived back from Ireland, the backpackers double booked us (yes again) so we ended up staying in a crappy little hostel in Earls Court. A small stinky room with a porta-loo shower was our home for a while we searched for someplace else to live. What’s a porta-loo shower you ask? Well, imagin the very compact toilets they put in airoplanes with a shower hanging from the top. This place just wasn’t going to work for us (well, me anyway) so our only focus for the entire week has been to find a flat.

We spent an entire week looking at heaps of places in lots of different areas but our new flat was the only one to get all ticks on our checklist:

– In a safe area

– Walking distance to a tube

– Furnished

– Within budget

– Close to shops (for groceries and stuff)

Everything has been completley refurbished and all the furniture is completley new. We have new fridges, washing machines, ovens… everything! The only bugger has been the cleaning. Because everything is new, we have had to clean everything. All the draws had saw grains inside them and there was paint and dust absoultly everywhere. It has been 5 days now and i am still cleaning the dust (yes mum i hear you laughing).

With only a couch and a kitchen sink in our flat, we had to do some shopping. They don’t have David Jones or Myers here, they don’t even have a house and garden or anything. Instead we had to choose all of our stuff out of a catelogue. In London, everyone uses this place call Argos to buy things for the home and everything is picked directly from a catelogue. It is so weird. We had to wait two days before our order arrived so when friends came over we had to use paper cups and plastic cuttlery. It was very funny but definetly an experience we will never forget.

Here are some recent pics:

This is our street.

This is the building our flat is in.

This is the park across the road from our flat. People bring their dogs here to play and there is a swing set for the kids.

               

This is our front gate and here is a pic of our front garden.

These are the stairs you walk down to get to our front door.

This is our front door, our welcome mat and our two little trees that we will need to shape someday soon.

This is our front patio area, a couple of our plants and that is our shed door on the right.

This is the other side of our front patio area, some more of our plants and you can also see the night lights in the wall. These look great when they are turned on at night. We are lucky to have a switch at the front door and another switch at the top of the stairs so that we can see where we are going when we get home late at night.

 This guy walked past today and yelled over to Nektarios “You have a nice yard”. It was so funny, Nektarios and i just looked at each other and started laughing. Can these few plants really be considered a “yard”. I personally don’t think so, but we are in London and things are different here.

This is what you see when you walk in the front door. It is our lounge room, and the kitchen, and the laundry, and the place i use to dry the washing, and the dining table where we eat, and the study where i work on my laptop.

This is our kitchen bench. It is located against the wall just behind that big couch in the last pic. You can see the washing machine in the corner (everyone has the washing machine in the kitchen here. weird!) Next to that is a little fridge, draws, the stove, the oven, more draws and a freezer down on the bottem left.

         

Here are a few shots of our bathroom. The shower, sinks and the toilet. Nektarios and i get seperate shelves and seperate sinks!!

This fantastic gadget is also in our bathroom. It is a towel rack and a bathroom heater all in one. It took us a little while to figure it out but once we got it we fell in love. What you do is hang the towels on the rack. The heaters heat up the towels (and the rest of the bathroom) and then you have warm towels waiting for you when you get out of the shower! Like i said, We Love IT!

   

Here are a few of our ‘catelogue’ purchases. We had to buy all of our bits and pieces for the kitchen. Suprisingly it was really cheap. Now we have our own kettle, iron, rubbish bins, mop, mop bucket, broom, ironing board, pots & pans, cuttlery, glass wear, plates etc etc.

  

This was our first dinner party. My friend Lydia from back home in Australia came over to visit us. We didn’t have any of our crockery at that point so we celebrated by drinking wine in paper cups and used plastic knives and forks. It was lots of fun.

One other great thing about where we live is that people actually use garbage bins here! This is very different to other streets in London. Everywhere else people just chuck their garbage out on the street YUK.