Greener Grass

Well, I guess you’ve picked up that the April A-Z has fallen by the wayside! This time it really isn’t my fault. Honest.

We’ve been looking to move house for a while and during the Easter holidays we saw a house, fell in love with it and decided to go for it. The problem is, there’s not really any hanging around with a rented property. When you buy a house (I’ve heard) you have to wait for contracts and surveys and solicitors and whatever else. With a rented house, the estate agent/landlord decide if you’d be a good tenant and that’s it, you’re good to go as soon as you arrange a date to pay your bond and first month’s rent. The estate agent here has a policy that once you apply for the house it’s off the market for four weeks then it goes back on and is fair game for anyone.

So we had four weeks to pay our bond and rent.

But we can’t pay rent for the house we’re living in and the one we’re going to live in.

So we have to move in four weeks.

But we had to wait a week to get approval from the estate agent.

So we have three weeks to move!

Yikes.

Three weeks to move a family of four, five years of accumulated STUFF (we’re all hoarders), baby STUFF, working-from-home STUFF. And the books. Lord help us, the books. We sold 6 boxes of books, we took another 10 boxes to Oxfam and we still have at least 7 boxes of books. That’s not including the babies’ books. Of which there are many.

Basically, I’m meeting myself coming backwards. So all writing, blogging, even twitter has gone out of the window. And I miss it – I miss tweeting my friends and writing the blog and writing full stop. Thankfully I know my friends will still be there when things have calmed down, as will my blog and my works in progress. I’m addicted to pinterest still, and being visual it’s easy to switch off from the house for twenty minutes and browse mindlessly. Plus there are cool ideas that I’m going to implement in the new house. But everything else has been put on the back boiler.

It’ll be worth it though. The new house has a garden – imagine the change from being in a first floor flat! There’s a bedroom each for the children and a converted garage where Andrew will have his office. It’s close to a small village school so Daniel will be near his new friends and it’s about ten minutes drive away from our parents.

I know it could be a case of the grass being greener on the other side. There will be downsides, such as getting used to having neighbours again. That’ll be nice but it will be hard having to watch our noise and putting up with other people’s. Umm…yeah, I’m sure there will be other things that crop up that take some getting used to. I’ll keep you posted.

Meanwhile, my sudden enthusiasm for housekeeping and homemaking and getting organised has happened at just the right time! I’ve developed on from my last post on getting organised and I now use a filofax and a home management file – more another time – and I’m about as organised as I can be at the minute. Tomorrow we go to visit the two possible schools and at the weekend we’ll have a packing marathon. It’s all going swimmingly…so far. Wish us luck!