Problems = Opportunities?

That's what the corporate suit trainers and life coaches would have you believe, any way.

Putting consideration of positive mental attitude to one side the move, nevertheless, has opened up some opportunities. For a start, the garage in the new house is detached from the house but has a good mains power supply. Best of all, I'm allowed to drill through the walls!!

So, job number 1 as part of the move was to run some trunking between the house and garage and install a pair of CAT6 cables to act as tie-lines between house and server farm. While I was at it, another CAT6 cable was run from my new ground-floor study up into the loft space and further lines run down from there to the room where Louise now has her study and the main bedroom. This allows the wireless (WiFi) access point and a small network switch to be sited in the loft - out of sight (and harm's way!) and - with high-gain antennae installed - to broadcast a strong 802.11g signal throughout the house.

As home networks go, this is close to nirvana. The computers in the house are mostly now on a gigabit backbone connection that ties to the similar setup in the garage. Hence, file transfers and backups now take place at lightning-fast speed. The laptops get a solid 54Mbps connection - and this without the repeater I was forced to deploy previously. It's been raining of late so I haven't tried to read my emails on the patio - yet. But, when I do, I'm pretty sure there'll be a solid connection there too - and if not, there's always the WiFi repeater now sitting in the cupboard to extend the range.

Who said moving was easy?

While on our U.S. trip, Louise and I had decided that it was pretty daft continuing to maintain two houses - especially as they were 30 miles apart and our weeks were spent driving up and down the A19 - one of England's less attractive trunk roads. So, a plan was hatched ...

I've been living in rented accommodation for the past two years so giving up "my" house was an easy decision to take. The problems started to appear as soon as we began thinking through how to squeeze two lots of possessions into one space. Thankfully, neither of us are particularly "precious" about most of our possessions and we are both extremely tolerant of the few things we each have that are held dear to our hearts.

But, where most people moving in together have the problems of wardrobe space and deciding whose furniture to keep, those considerations were just the starting point for us. In my case, I arrive with a whole lot more "baggage" than the norm: the cars, the computers, the recording gear ...

Two things quickly became clear: If we were to set up home together this side of Christmas, we would have to move into Louise's existing 4-bed house and all thoughts of (sensibly) looking for a new home big enough to hold all our stuff would have to wait and ... the move itself was going to be a major exercise requiring some careful planning - and not a little bit of luck!