Finally! I've got back here to blog.
I had to take a break as the process of moving out of our house and into my mother-in-law's was fairly fraught and punctuated by illness, injury and just plain old-fashioned exhaustion.
We moved in on 4th May, and to be honest I'm only just now feeling better about everything. I don't miss the house at all. For the first time in 10 years I'm sleeping right through the night without waking and feel 'unburdened'. I had no idea how much that house affected my health.
The chickens, however, were in uproar at being taken from a large pen and garden to a small pen and patch of grass, and started eating their own eggs and screaming in frustration, but now they have settled a little more. They found all the cosy little corners of the garden to hang out in, and are 'allowing' us to have one egg a day. Fleagle doesn't care a jot. She sleeps on the windowsill in the sun and eats her food and seems quite content. Georgie, however, is not a happy camper, having been taken away from his beloved hunting fields to sit in a house looking out of the window, but it is for his own protection. The house is on a main road and he will be squished like countless cats before him have been on that road. He will remain a house cat until we move up to Lincolnshire.
Talking of Lincolnshire, we've found somewhere to buy. I genuinely thought we were never going to find something.
Originally, we had decided on three criteria: to find somewhere that we could all live in happily together but separately, that had enough storage for Martin's cars, and some land for me to raise a couple of sheep and pigs for the freezer. Crucially, Martin's mother would be putting money into the house and that meant we would go without a mortgage. We would be mortgage free.
Only one problem. We could not find anything in that price bracket that met all of our requirements. For two of us yes but not three. We've been looking for a couple of years on and off and hadn't seen anything, and after 12 weeks of scouring all of the East Anglia, Suffolk, Norfolk, Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, Nottinghamshire, Cambridgeshire and Lincolnshire every single day and not seeing anything, we were pretty sure that the property did not exist. The problem was to compromise on two of the three criteria meant that one of us wouldn't be getting what we wanted.
We decided that we had to go out and view some of the properties that fulfilled two of the three criteria, reasoning that in the flesh the houses might show how they could be adapted in time to meet all three. But it was no good, nothing grabbed us at all. Nothing worked or could be adapted. Most of them were better looking in the photos than in real life and we left viewings deflated at the unworkable dirt, mess and flooding expertly 'hidden' by estate agent's photos.
Then by chance, when we giving some feedback on a viewing to one agent, she mentioned there was something that might suit but it was a lot above our budget. It had been on the market for over a year and the owners were not too keen to sell for some reason. What the hell, pop it over, I said.
OMG. There it was. Yes, we'd have to have a mortgage, but there it was. We viewed the next evening, and it clicked immediately. It felt like coming home. Enough room for all of us to live without getting under each other's feet, a set of dry barns for Martin to do his cars and a half acre paddock with fruit trees for me to serve as grazing ground.
Buoyed up, I scoured the property ads for other houses in this new price bracket, we even viewed a few, but again nothing was suitable. It seems we found the only house that we could have found for us. We did the 'offer' dance back and forth with the owners for a few days and finally they accepted us. They were not reticent to sell, they had just had a lot of unsuitable offers and people wanting the barns to develop and not the house. They wanted someone to respect the entire property and use it as a family home.
So, at the moment we are doing the searches and the survey has been done, and hopefully in the next six weeks or so we will complete.
And then a new chapter of our life can begin.