We bought a house and it was really stressful! 🔑

Crack open the champagne, I'll go to the chippy and then we'll sit in silence surrounded by boxes with no clue what's in any of them 🍾🐟🍟

We bought a house, and I feel equal parts deliriously happy and incredibly unsettled by all this change. My nervous system doesn’t know what has hit it.

It is not lost on me how lucky we are to even be in a position to buy our own home, but when you’ve got no WiFi, no phone signal and no fridge, and there isn’t actually a clear pathway through the house because there are so many boxes everywhere, the euphoric feeling of owning property and being literally hundreds of thousands of pounds in debt really does start to wane a bit.

But hey, we did it, we’re in, and slowly but surely, it is starting to look less like an Amazon fulfilment centre and more like a home that people actually live in. The WiFi is being activated on Monday, the fridge freezer and washing machine arrived yesterday and best of all, I got a solid eight hours of sleep last night and am therefore feeling remarkably chipper as I write this in my local Pret (the WiFi is free and the coffee is strong, and that’s really my only criteria for cafes nowadays).

I have only had one meltdown/Big Cry, which I am calling a major win considering the total chaos that we have been living in for the past few days. In complete contrast to my worrisome disposition, James has been completely unflappable, and I am almost falling down with gratitude that my partner is someone who always makes it his top priority to be the calm amidst the chaos.

There are of course many, many glorious things about moving into your first home: the first turn of the key in the lock, the first drink at the local pub, the first time you look around and realise, bloody hell, we own these walls. There are many, many very stressful things about it too. Problems and inconveniences that would never have even made it on to your bingo card pre-house ownership will wiggle their way in, making your life just a half percentage point harder when you’re already trying to navigate the chaos of moving your entire life from one location to another.

It goes without saying that these are very much first world problems, but they are problems that we are experiencing nonetheless, and I think it’s important to share the good, the bad and the ugly in life. If nothing else, the stuff that goes wrong is almost always far more interesting than the stuff that goes right. Things like spending three hours on a Tuesday evening deep cleaning your rental house so you might have a slim chance of getting your full deposit back; almost having a menty b because you can’t find the lightbulbs for your bedside lamps; skirting around piles of random stuff and not having enough brain space to think logically about where to put them; inexplicably losing vital things, like knives, or tea towels, or that screw that I saw literally five minutes ago; enduring a lukewarm at best shower because you haven’t quite figured out how the boiler works. And on it goes.

It’s been a journey, to say the least. When I actually take the time to think about it, this is probably the biggest life change that I have had to navigate for some years. The move to a more rural area was absolutely the right choice for us, but it will also challenge us to think differently and embrace a new way of living compared to the life and routines that we knew before. Commuting into London will take more thought and planning; the amount of tiny creatures that end up flying or crawling in through any open window is staggering; we’ve had to order a couple of torches on Amazon, because the walking route up into the village is incredibly dark at night. Honestly, I think part of me will actually miss not being contactable before 9am and after 5pm. Perhaps there’s a lesson to be learned there, but that’s for another post.

Here’s to a new chapter. I can’t wait to show you more of the house soon!

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Thanks so much for reading, I hope you enjoyed this little life update. I’m off back to my internet-free zone, but I’ll be back online and in your inboxes very soon 🥰