Week 361

We spent pretty much the whole week selling or giving away stuff in our office and storage unit. Chris was scheduled to move out of his flat and move down to Ramsgate on Friday, and so we had to be pretty focussed to get everything sorted in time.

We advertised a lot of items on Gumtree which meant we had to spend a lot of time negotiating prices, arranging for people to collect things, etc. There was also a lot of traipsing back and forth to the storage unit up by Old Street roundabout and several trips in a Zipvan between the office, the storage unit and my flat.

When things didn’t sell, we ended up offering them for free just to get rid of them. We also carried quite a few boxes of things from the storage unit to a charity shop on Whitecross Street. I think the woman there was a bit bemused by us, but she seemed happy enough with the stuff - mostly crockery, I think.

On Monday morning, I upgraded Ruby on our Linode VPS to v2.1.7. In the afternoon we disassembled the sofa and someone came to pick it up that evening. On Tuesday morning I met a van from the British Heart Foundation who kindly took away our office chairs, fridge and coffee table. Unfortunately they wouldn’t take our bookcase, because it was slightly damaged, nor the conference table or big metal cupboard, because they were too big.

On Wednesday we advertised a job lot of miscellaneous items on Freecycle in a final effort to empty the office. We also gave away a few things to people at Shoreditch Works including our printer and Chris’ standing desk. At lunchtime I headed up to the storage unit to meet someone who was buying the big metal cupboard.

Amidst the chaos on Wednesday, Chris somehow got some week notes written up and published. On Thursday morning we took a big pile of company paperwork to Mailboxes Etc to have it scanned and later someone collected the Freecycle job lot.

On Thursday afternoon we headed to the George & Vulture for Chris’ leaving drinks. We got there early (3pm) so we could snaffle a table before the Christmas hoards descended. This plan sort of worked, although we ended up with rather a small table, because all the others were reserved. The early start also meant that I had one or two more beers than were strictly necessary. However, it was good to see Ben, Chris L, James A, Murray, Tom W & Tom S and to give Chris a bit of a send off for his trip to New Zealand.

I just about dragged myself out of bed on Friday morning to meet someone at the storage unit to collect the bookcase. I didn’t envy Chris who was moving out of his flat and driving a van down to Ramsgate that day, but by all accounts it all went smoothly.

Later I met Paul for lunch at Freebird Burritos in the Shoreditch Food Village. After lunch we retired to the, now rather empty, office for a cup of tea and Paul then departed with the Battley-o-tron¹ as he’d promised.

On Saturday morning, someone came to my flat to buy our projector. And in the afternoon I met a couple of people who collected the TV/monitor stand and the conference table respectively from the storage unit. At that point the storage unit was finally empty and I checked us out. Yay!

We won’t be writing week notes for the two weeks over Christmas and New Year, so I’ll just briefly mention here that I went in to the office again on Monday, 21st December, to sort a few things out. The main thing I did was to go through the scanned documents to check them. It turned out that a bunch of them were missing pages, so I kept those back, and then took the rest back to Mailboxes Etc to get them shredded.

I then shoved the last few items into my rucksack and bid a fond farewell to an eerily quiet Shoreditch Works. The office there has served us well - it was a much more sensible size for the two of us than the office on Worship Street.

Although it was pretty exhausting, I felt as if the week flew by. It was good to have the hard deadline of Chris’ flat move to spur us on. I’m naturally a bit of a hoarder, so it was actually quite therapeutic to get rid of so much stuff in such a short time. I hope I can apply the same technique to my own stuff sometime soon!

Anyway that’s all for now, folks.

– James