Moving House

So one big thing that's been going on in my life lately has been the process of selling my house and looking for a new, bigger one with my other half.  It's been quite a rollercoaster...

I moved a few times as a kid, but as an adult, without my parents, I've only ever moved from a rented flat into a rented house (so an exciting improvement), and from a rented house into buying my first one. So it's always been about leaving somewhere that wasn't 'mine'/I was just renting and somewhere with issues. This time it feels so different. This has been my house and home for years. I've loved it here.  It's such a cool house, with lovely wooden floors, original 30s/40s doors with bakelite handles, a beautiful south facing great sized garden, a quiet street.  But, unless we extended and lost the space/drive on the side (it's a semi-detached) it will always just be a 2 bed house, and when you both work from home and have fair bit of 'stuff', there just wouldn't be the option to grow our little family here.  So, as much as I love it, if we want to move forward and grow, I have to accept we need to move to new pastures. It just makes it so much harder to find something you want to move for when your heart is so wrapped up in your current place!

To start with, we were super set on ideally getting a mid-century, 60s era, style older house with character, and nice size gardens. We started looking early Spring last year and put this on the market. Over the course of the year we put offers on about 4 places I think, none worked out until last October/November when we put an offer on a 4 bed detached that was way above the budget we initially set ourselves, and also not in our 'mid-century' ideal category.  But, to be honest, we'd sold this in the Summer, and viewed so. many. houses. It was getting to a point where we had to accept that we may need to pay a bit more to get something we feel is enough of an upgrade/enough of a reason to move, and also understand that it's not going to tick all the boxes as that would be near impossible to find somewhere completely perfect.

The house we've had an offer accepted on was listed at a whopping 75k above our initial budget! They accepted an offer of a fair chunk less, which was a surprise, and I think we both felt a weird mix of excitement and joy and apprehension and panic, even sadness on my part, when they did! As it started this process of definitely living my home here.  Over the last few months we've had moments of questioning whether it's the right thing to be doing, due to money, how happy we are in this current house, and if we  were arguing in our relationship, but I feel happy about us moving forward and I'm super excited about making our new places a home too. As a friend said, a house is just bricks really, it's all the stuff and memories you take with you and photos you put on the walls etc that makes it feel like a home, so I'm sure we'll settle in the new place and love it.

I've been getting heavily into the planning side with the interiors and decor. The current owners are super modern and clean in their style, so there's grey walls everywhere, no colour, white laminate floors etc, so we've got to make the place feel more us with our vintage furniture and style. Basically got to inject some colour and character into the place. We even picked up some old doors in the same style as the ones here from a house in Derby via Facebook market place months ago with the intention of taking them to wherever we move to haha.  I'm hoping to document the process of making our thoroughly modern house more mid-century so watch this space. When pennies allow it anyway...

The new place has a lot going for it.  We're gaining two bedrooms, including a bigger main bedroom with an en-suite! (including a shower, we only have a bath currently).  One of the little bedrooms gives us the ability to have a nice office room to work from. We'll have a hallway, just have a little square entrance bit now so you basically enter straight to the staircase, and a garage too. Going to have a much bigger kitchen, and a conservatory too. Basically we'll have much more space. We are losing garden space, which is quite a big loss for me as I do love my garden, but it's not tiny, maybe like 1/3 smaller than our current back garden, and the direction means it doesn't get as much sun. But the house itself has lots going for it, lots of rooms to make 'us'.

We did have a completion date in March, but then my solicitor called last week to say our seller is now saying she can't do that date, so it's up in the air again. We went back with a later date in March to try get a new date in writing for both us and for our buyers too, but she said she couldn't do then and started saying she can only do Fridays and the earliest she can offer is April 1st. Of course that's like the one date we can't do haha, so went back, yet again, and have suggested Friday 8th... I just want to get the move done now. We're surrounded by boxes!

Fingers crossed!