Villa Moving!

So it was time to vacate our current rental villa. Unfortunately, despite loving the villa, the owners have sold up so we had no option to move.

After much searching and assistance from several agents, we found a suitable property only a few kilometres down the hill in Emba.

I had contacted one of the local removal services companies and they had been out and surveyed the move, and estimated that we could have everything moved down to the new villa in 1 day.

I was a little bit sceptical of this, considering it had taken a 40' container and a team of guys 5 days to pack it up when we moved from Qatar to Cyprus. I appreciate that there would be no export wrapping, but still thought it would be tight.

Anyway, 8.30am on a Friday morning, the team arrived from Peter Morton Removals and got to work.

When we moved into the Tala villa, the removal company that did that, used a forklit with basket to carry everything from the street, up the driveway and then over the various balconies into the respective levels. These guys carried everything by hand from the villa to the van. It didn't help that it was a baking hot day with clear blue skies and glorious sunshine! The guys earnt their pay that day!

By early afternoon they were really starting to fill up the lorry, and had started to move some of the random stuff down to the villa using a smaller van. By late afternoon they had packed up everything and taken the load down to the new villa, and started offloading.

I had decided that I would disassemble the beds as I had built them and stripped them and rebuilt them once already, when we arrived in Qatar, left Qatar and arrived in Cyprus, so knew how they went together and which screw/bolt went where.

By around 6.30pm, everything was down in the new villa, the removal guys disappeared, and we got on with the unpacking and rebuilding. They did however, rebuild the baby grand piano, which they disassembled, and then took 8 guys to lift down the outside stairs at the Tala villa. That was really the only thing we were concerned about, but safe to say it survived!

We were down at the new villa dealing with the first load, when the 2nd crew up at the old villa were finishing off, so were there when they left, so they had accidentally left a couple of boxes and some stuff lying in the garden. We went back up to the old villa just to make sure it was all secure and lights off and picked up the last few small bits and bobs.

By around 11pm, we were absolutely pooped, having rebuilt the 4 beds again, and emptied a significant number of the boxes it was off to bed.

We had one slight issue, I had booked the internet WISP provider (Cosmos Wireless) to come at 3pm and reconnect/reconfigure us at the new villa, and they arrived on time, however, despite keeping the internet routers etc. aside so that I had them, they [removal guys] unfortunately managed to pack the dish in another box which was now buried in the lorry. The WISP technician agreed to fit another temporary dish to get us going and then he would come back at a later date and swap out with our original dish once we had located it. The internet service, despite using the same provider access point was much better, as we weren't getting the same level of interference from Melissouvonos.

We had arranged with the old landlady to meet and hand over the keys a couple of days later. After a check round the property, it was handover and final goodbye to the place!

And hello new villa!

The dog is absolutely delighted with the new garden, it constantly goes out, patrolling the boundary fence and rummaging in the bushes, chasing beasties etc.