Five great ideas for boring house gifts

Your friends just moved into a new house, and they invited you round. It would be nice to take them a present, for the house, but what should you get? Here are some house gifts that seem pretty dull, but in fact may be highly appreciated by the homeowners.

1. A wheelbarrow

Maybe not such a good idea if they don't have a garden. More of a garden gift than a house gift. A very useful garden gift.

2. Extension cables

There are never enough sockets in a house, and they are often in the wrong place. Especially useful are extensions with multiple sockets, each with a switch. Sockets with timers can also be useful.

3. A bucket
The chances are that nobody else got one for them. Buckets always come in handy, for example when your friends have their first flood. You could get a really nice stainless steel one. Or you could get a plastic bucket that look like metal, if they have a sense of humour.

4. Shelf brackets

Houses never have enough shelves. Don't buy the actual shelves as they will probably be the wrong size.

5. A snow shovel
Good for areas where it snows, obviously. They may already have one, but it may not be a very good one and low quality snow shovels break fairly quickly. Snow is a lot heavier than it looks. Even if they already have a good one, another one could come in handy since shovelling snow is much faster and more fun in company.

And even if it doesn't snow in your area now, it may do soon! Global warming means higher temperatures and more extreme weather. Since most of the world's surface is water, that higher temperature is going to mean more evaporation, and more moisture in the atmosphere. When that moisture hits extreme cold, you're going to get snow. 

Talking rubbish

We moved over a month ago and there is still some rubbish to clear up in the old house. We've been trying to get back there in between working, sorting out our new home and looking after the kids, and it's mostly cleared up, but there is still work to do. I switched off the electricity at the breaker, so the water pipe heaters have been off, and the pipes are now frozen. It's been below freezing for most of the last fortnight, and was minus 2.4 at the height of the midday sun today.

We moved what we immediately needed as soon as we could. In fact we moved most of our stuff on the first day. Some things that we're going to need later, we moved later. Then, out of what remains, we've been taking the things that we want and throwing away what we don't want. There still seems to be stuff left in the gap between. Then there are things we don't really want, or need, but feel that somebody, somewhere must want or need them so we shouldn't throw them away.

For example, the things that people gave us when we had a baby, that they had used when they had had a baby. Should we throw them away or give them to someone else who has just had a baby? But actually, a lot of these thing we never really used when we had a baby. Maybe the people who gave them to us didn't use them either. These things just get bought by one pair of gullible parents and passed on from couple to couple without ever being used. This must be a lucrative business.

Anyway, the remains of our residence are becoming increasingly large and undiscernible. Even if we decide to throw something away, Matsumoto's rigourous rubbish regime takes some navigating, and you can't just leave any old crap in a wheelie bin out the back whenever you like, but that is a topic for another day.

We're in!

We moved in on Friday. There is still some stuff left in the last house, and plenty of cleaning and tidying to do there, but we have everything we need in the new house--it's just a case of getting it out of the right box. Since we did the big move on Friday with some help from our friends, and a three-ton removal van and the professionals, we've been back three or four times to get more stuff. I forgot to get the kettle twice times. 

There are still plenty of boxes everywhere, but we're determined to get everything out of them. Rather than rummaging through to find things, we're trying to take things out and put them away as we go along. Now that we have a new home, we're also trying to find a home for all the little things that live in it. The storage space should be ample, but seems to be very quickly filling up.

Already it feels more comfortable than the old house, even though the underfloor heating isn't working yet. They're coming to fix that today, so it should be a couple of degrees warmer. It's now somewhere in the mid teens, which is fine if you're moving around, and we  have an electric carpet under the dining table, and put the air conditioner on. 

When the removal men were in the house, they opened one door on the north side and one on the south side, which very effectively got a through draft of biting winter air. Even then, as soon as you went upstairs it was much warmer. 

There is still a little more work to do on the house, and a few hundred things to write about. 

We've got to move

The removal man came around yesterday for an estimate. As we're close we'll try and do some of it ourselves, with a little help from our friends, but it's going to be much easier to leave the big stuff to the professionals. Like many things in Japan there is a well-developed system for moving that will run smoothly and painlessly. The man was young and polite, wearing a suit and tie and holding a clipboard and calculator. He went around the house looking at what we've got and then totted it up on his check sheet. He gave us a 40-page A4 brochure that is both a showcase of their service, with reassuring pictures of their smiling, uniformed staff, shoes off and socks clean, and a manual for the mover. On the back it says "We care you", but I don't want to point out their omission. Prepositions have nothing to do with moving house. 

When he left he gave us fifty boxes. Small ones for heavy things and big ones for light things. They have special boxes for wardrobes with hangers in, but we'll do the clothes ourselves and don't need any of those. Each box has a label where you can write the contents, and circle where the box is coming from in the old house and where it is going to in the new house, not just the floor and the room, but which part of the room. There is red tape to put on boxes of fragile things, and yellow tape for others. In the booklet there is a page of numbered and coloured stickers to put on the video and stereo cables and sockets, and presumably they will put everything in place and plug it in for you if you ask nicely. 

After a few minutes going through the checksheet with his calculator, we came to the negotiation. He said we'd get away with a short two-ton truck for just taking the essential big things--the fridge, washing machine, desks, table and chairs. If we wanted to get everything in one truck we'd need a four tonner. We decided on a three-ton truck, and will start first thing in the morning moving stuff ourselves, and may well have some left over until the following day.

It's not that any of us are particularly acquisitive, but we've accumulated a fair amount of crap over the past eleven years living in this house. Now's the chance to look through and get rid of what we don't need, but also we're not very good at throwing things out. Maybe that's part of not being acquisitive. With clothes I partly blame it on being a second child with a close older brother, and only ever getting hand-me-downs. The only time I can remember getting new clothes is when we were all dressed up in the same outfits. Perhaps it's the other way round, and the cause is my own sartorial ambivalence, but I'm not interested in clothes and don't like to wear new things, and feel obliged to keep everything. 

This may also be inherited from parents who were brought up during the war and rationing, when everything was precious and valuable and needed looking after. In these times of profligate consumerism, mountains of garbage and energy crises, it's difficult to argue with respecting anything for the intrinsic value of its resources and the time and energy that have gone into making it and bringing into your home.

And perhaps my Yorkshire roots have something to do with this. I'll not say that people from Yorkshire are mean, but they have a word, "thoil", that means to be able to financially afford something but not able to justify spending money on it. So it's going to be a busy week as I can neither thoil getting all our stuff moved by the professionals, nor throwing out anything that there's even a slim chance we'll use some time.