Diary of a move: inventory

I've got a bit of a headache. The kind of headache brought on by days of counting and Googling. I've spent the past few days re-doing our household inventory, which was something that we had to do before the move to Berlin. Basically the way the move works is that you don't pack anything yourself, something which is very disconcerting as you still have full cupboards and your toiletries sitting out on shelves on the day you're moving, but you leave it all to the removal men to pack. Otherwise, apparently, if you've packed anything yourself it's not covered by the insurance.

So instead of merrily flinging things into boxes and binbags (our usual method of moving house) admittedly, usually on the last day, you have another job to do. The household inventory. Talk about a pain. List all the rooms in your house, then room by room list every item in it. Then for Google fans, you have to go through it all and find out how much it would cost to replace each item in your list brand new should it get broken or lost during the move.

That's what I've been doing. Yesterday the guy from the removal company came to have a look round and judge whether all our stuff would fit back into the same sized container that it came across in. The good news is, it does. I thought we were also going to be handing over the inventory and going through that. The bad news (for me) was, we didn't. he didn't need it. I feel like printing the damn thing out and eating it.

In other news, we are just about to book our flights & hotel for our house-hunting trip at the beginning of November! i'm quite excited about that, despite the fact that the very limited choice of houses in the area where we're hoping to rent are all pretty horrible. I'm living in hope that something that I like will appear just a couple of days before our trip at the right price and in a good location. Well, you never know.