They say that the three most stressful things in life are having a baby, moving home and divorce.
As one who is currently in the throes of one – the house move – and indirectly experiencing another – a buyer and a daughter both expecting and due around removal date - I can confirm “they” are right!
Finding a buyer was the easy bit and accomplished by January. Completion by mid-April and before babies’ due dates? No problem, we thought. Wrong. Having bought and sold a few homes over the years I thought I knew the ropes.  But the last time was 25 years ago, and things have changed – a lot!
A stack of documents and paperwork now seem to be required. What do they want, my life story? I’m pretty efficient, some would say a hoarder, but at least I’ve been able to supply copies of every dot and comma of the history of work that has been done to a 100 year-old house over the years.
It’s not over yet.  The requests keep on coming and every time the moving date slips a couple of weeks.
Meanwhile, have you ever tried to downsize the contents of a four-bedroomed house into a two-bedroomed house?  So far there have been four trips to the book recycling point, three carloads to the charity shop plus a van full to a local furniture charity – and there’s still too much stuff!
The children may have left home but having at last reached the murky depths of the many cupboards with which old houses are amply supplied it seems a lot of their “stuff” hasn’t left and of course, even though they haven’t looked at any of it for years, it has to be kept and, of course, they have no room! There is one solution; store it all with HomeStore and send them the bill!
It’s now mid April. There are packed boxes everywhere, still one final (I hope) bit of paper chase going on, the babies have been born, the solicitor’s now moving offices too and still no completion date.
They keep telling me the end is in sight but at this point I’m tempted to just store the whole lot with HomeStore and take off travelling! 

Guest blog by Alison Withers, of multimediareputations.com, who writes the HomeStore e-news, among many other things. For more information about Alison please click here