Well well 2013, you started so well….. For all of the first 24 hours or so. Ok so that’s perhaps an exaggeration, the first 20-ish days weren’t all that bad (the 16th being a particular highlight – it being my birthday an all). I learnt a great many lessons over the past few months, the highlights of which I’ll share with you below.

Snow I literally hate it. Your car gets stuck, . . .

. . . it’s hard to walk in and it makes moving house, very, very difficult as you can’t get the van in the car park so you have to unload it on the street and between two of you carry everything into the building through snow an then carry it all up 3 flights of stairs!

Car being written off I was in Redditch less than an hour when some local van driver decided to pull out from parked at the side of the road straight into my car. Now the damage caused wasn’t massive . . .

. . . But due to the age of the vehicle, it’s not worth much so the cost of repairing it would of been more than its worth “beyond economical repair” so the insurance people wrote it off.

Flat flooding moved in less than a week and the water drainage pipe from the kitchen “sprung a leak”

by which I mean became detached from another pipe, which oh by the way is in the middle of a wall and completely inaccessible by anything less than a hammer!

Moving house is expensive, really expensive! Now I’ve only had the misfortune of moving from rented to rented accommodation so I dread to think how much worse buying/selling a house would be but still . . . We have to pay a deposit up front, on average about 1.5 months rent, referencing fees just so they call your previous landlord, do a credit check and call your employer to check your income. That’s another few hundred quid! Then on the day you move in you’ll have to obviously pay the first months rent! All of this has to happen before you even your previous damage deposit back, assuming you’ve been good and not wrecked it. Once you’re in, you then have all of the fun and games of paying all the final bills at the place you’ve left while setting up all the new bills at the new place.