When my father reported that he had just purchased a new house in new housing development, we were all overjoyed. For a long time, he had wished to purchase his own home. My parents had been living in several rental houses since they married. Finally, his fantasy had come true.
We began moving our belongings into our new home on a bright and sunny Sunday morning. My father hired a lorry to transfer our goods, and I was amazed at how much we had. The lorry had to make three journeys before most of our belongings arrived at our new home. I enjoyed sitting in the back of the lorry while it made the excursions. My parents, grandmother, elder sister, and I were the sole members of our family. Nonetheless, the number of goods, both necessary and useless, was astounding.
We had a frantic day loading the items onto the lorry and then unloading them at our new home, but that was not the end of the story. We had to move the things into the house and arrange them properly before we could call the house a home.
Our new house was a single-story terrace house, the fourth in a sequence of identical houses. It contained three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, two bathrooms, a small kitchen, a small front porch, and an even smaller garden. Modern dwellings are extremely cramped for room, but it was better than nothing. In any case, it was a significant improvement over our prior home, which was much smaller than the new one.
The kitchen was the first area we started organizing things. We needed to take care of our tummies before we could do any more work, so my mother set about creating her first meal in her brand-new kitchen, whipping up the greatest tasting instant mee lunch I’d ever tasted.
We moved on to the rest of our belongings after lunch. My parents got the largest bedroom, my grandmother and sister got the second largest, and I got the tiniest, right close to the kitchen. I was totally overjoyed. For the first time in my life, I got my own room, and it even had a ceiling fan to keep me cool.
We had most of the furniture, mattresses, and larger items in by the evening. The only thing left to do was hang up the portraits and other wall decorations, curtains, and other such items. We postponed the finishing touches till the next day because we were all exhausted from working all day. Despite her rheumatic joints, my grandmother was very active. After all, she had to be as ecstatic as we were.
That evening, we enjoyed our first formal meal in the house. By nine o’clock, I was in my new bedroom, which still smelled like new paint. I gladly lay on the bed, taking in everything my senses got in my new surroundings. It was fantastic. I quickly fell asleep in my new room.
