It’s all starting to come together now. With power, phone and internet all connected and up and running, we can finally start living in our own flat. It has taken almost two weeks but finally we have our internet connected, and I can start using my computer more productively. As a Computing student, I really can say that I need the internet for my studies, and i can also claim that playing games helps my course, but of course this is easier to claim when I can do research on the internet. The next issue is to start running cables neatly around the house for the computers. We have one phone line in the house and it is located in the hallway. Unfortunately, the nearest power point on the other side of the hallway, so we need to run a phone cable across the hall to the modem, and that seems to block traffic just a bit too much. So we need to buy a decent length cable, and some cable clips to neatly run it around the walls so that it is no longer in the way, and doesn’t look bad. We did however buy a wireless router so we can reduce cables quite a lot by using wireless on all our computers. This is of course, except for my own desktop machine which I will have running as a streaming file server that, for sanity’s sake, needs to be wired. This has resulted in deciding upon getting a really long piece of ethernet cable and running it through the house. This too needs to be neatly pinned to the walls, because its bound to be tripped over otherwise, and that wouldn’t be good for the person tripping or my computer at the other end being pulled on. It seems that each problem we solve only leads to more problems. At least we have internet now.

We finally have the flat to ourselves as well. The previous tenant has come to collect all his stuff, and in the process unlocking another room. We now have a key for every door (albeit a few locks aren’t the greatest) and are up to four house keys, thanks to the landlord who had spares of everything. We also got to the point we had set for the deadline for remaining items in the house to be claimable, so have acquired a large amount of kitchen-ware; pots, pans, utensils, cleaning products, plates, cups and cutlery. Then there was the food, at least two boxes full of non-perishables, and other items that we believe to be alright to eat, as well as some that I’m pretty sure would kill me. And there was also a few heaters and other bits of furniture that we will no doubt make use of.

So things are looking up in the flat, we still need to do cleaning, and the kitchen in now high priority, but there is no rush yet. It’s really starting to feel like home now.