Garth George: Many hands make light work of the house-move

They say that changing jobs is one of the more traumatic experiences of life, but I have never found it so. Perhaps that's because I've always worked in the newspaper game and one newsroom is much like any other.

Once you've found where the loos are, where to get coffee and stationery supplies and where the best place is to buy lunch, you just put your head down and get on with the job. In daily journalism there isn't much time to do anything else.

Another of life's little traumas is moving house. Moving house is the pits. It's not so much the moving itself that is the problem; rather it's all that goes before - and after.

You would think that after 16 moves in 28 years of marriage, my wife and I would be experts. We are. But we're both a lot older than we were the last time we moved and, as with pretty much everything else in life, the older you get the more difficult once-routine activities seem to be.

We put our former home on what was said to be a buoyant market in March. It took four and a half months to sell.

And for every day of that time, in the face of the inconsiderate ways of land agents, the house had to be kept immaculate.

Which it was, to the astonishment of those agents who seemed to take delight in turning up without warning, despite assurances that notice would be given.

Just why the house didn't sell promptly remains a mystery, but eventually it did, although not for the price the agencies had assured us was reasonable. You tend to take their word for it since no agent is much interested in overpriced properties which are hard to sell.

And, of course, you remain po-faced when, with an offer on the table, they all of a sudden change their mind and tell you the offer is more than reasonable.

I worked out years ago that, with some notable and much-appreciated exceptions, land agents don't work for the vendor or the buyer. They work for themselves.

And be warned: these days some agents add GST on top of their handsome commissions, a fact you don't necessarily discover until the deal is done and you have to fork out hundreds of dollars more than you anticipated.

While all this is going on, of course, you're spending your weekends traipsing all over the city looking for a new place to live.

Our buying and selling over the past decade or so had convinced us that there was no such thing as the perfect house. You can imagine our surprise, therefore, when we found one - exactly what we wanted and at better than the right price.

So in went the offer so fast the agent's head must have spun. And our house stayed on the market ... and stayed and stayed and stayed. It's the next best thing to a living nightmare, I can tell you.

However, all's well that ends well, as they used to say, and in the end we bought the home we wanted and, three weeks on from moving, are more or less settled.

I say more or less because there is still the landscaping to be completed and the garage to be organised. And the time it takes to be fully at home in a new house - to know, for instance, where the light switches are and what lights they operate without having to think - has not yet passed.

One of the comforts of the move this time has been the efficiency, cheerfulness, competence and reliability of the tradesmen with whom we have dealt, from painters to carpenters to blind-makers to electricians to plumbers, all of whom - after one false start - have done what they said they would when they said they would.

The false start was a bloke I hired to build a couple of critical, dog-proof fences and who let me down at the last minute. But another building chap engaged by telephone stepped smartly into the breach and the fences were built in plenty of time - and at a most reasonable price.

The painter who repainted the interior, the people who made and installed the vertical blinds, the man who installed the fittings in the walk-in wardrobe, the electrician who wired the place for Sky digital and the plumber who came to fix a toilet all carried out their tasks promptly and cheerfully.

But of them all we will remember most fondly the two merry Islanders, each built like a brick dunny, who moved us on the day. We watched in amazement as they hoisted huge reclining armchairs and three-seater couches on to their shoulders and carted them out to the truck as if they had been made of cane.

They helped to make the day bearable for us and, when they presented the bill, we couldn't believe it. I don't know how they make a quid at the prices they charge.

You hear a lot of complaints about Kiwi tradesmen; we have none. And I was delighted to see that both the electrician and the plumber had apprentices with them learning their trades. Bravo.