On staying put.
I seriously can’t count how many times a week I am asked if I am moving. Worse, I don’t know how to answer. This is starting to make me feel like the boy who cried wolf.
It all started when we decided we would be better off with a mortgage rather than renting, so we went on our merry way for the depressing event that is one’s first mortgage interview, and then we went away to rearrange our savings and start houseshopping.
I have to tell you, the very first house we looked at? We still love it. On the day, it was a little past our price range, plus it was the very first house we saw, so we were thinking it would stupid for so many reasons to put an offer in that day. Unfortunately, another couple who were viewing the house at the same time, not only put in an offer on the spot, they put in more than the asking price. Seriously, who does that? They must have really thought we were going to try to buy it. Or they were just weird and ten million kinds of stupid. So yeah, we weren’t going to be moving in that particular instance.
But that was so long ago, the entries don’t even go back on this blog. It predates the pink polkadot era back to my days on livejournal. And if you’ve been reading since all the way back then, frankly, you deserve a medal.
We looked at tons of houses for a few weeks. We put in an offer on one. We argued the offer back and forth. In the end, it all came down to a refridgerator and a pair of fitted miniblinds, but we did not buy that house either. That took up so much energy that we sat back and didn’t look for a good few months. And that was easily a year and a half ago.
So friends continue to ask if we’re moving, and we go on little week-long househunting excursions. We consider neighbourhoods that surprise everyone. We debate the small-in-the-city versus bigger-in-suburbia argument. We look online, but get too frustrated from calling estate agents only to find that all the properties they’ve put online are already gone. So we look at a few and then stop again. And then out of the blue, we decide yet again we need to look.
If my stripey-socked feet could talk to you, they would say house shopping is a terrible, terrible idea. Today they have walked up and down several neighbourhoods several times, sometimes on nice streets and sometimes on scary streets, and all in terribly uncomfortable shoes. (Of course, they weren’t uncomfortable when I left home…only once I was far away from anything resembling comfortable shoes.) They have looked at flats that cost twice as much as ours but are half the size. And then they decided to visit pretty much every estate agent in Islington (which oh my goodness is a lot of estate agents) only to collapse on the train, still without an answer.
Maybe some day we’ll move. But my feet say definitely not this week.
And to add something crafty to this otherwise craft-lacking update, girls doing the Fill My Little World album at Moxley and Ickenham…are you ready to start your homework? I’m emailing it out in the morning! All done, but I want to wait until the morning to proofread and double check! And then you can get to work!
xlovesx
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