50 days later...

Exactly 50 days ago I received the txt message from our landlord asking us to move out of what we had come to regard as our home. It was a silly mistake to get so attached to a rented property but now we are well on the way to getting the first house we can truly call our home. Eeeeep!!

For those who don't know much about buying a house a brief explanation is required, to explain the stress-related snappy-ness we have both been suffering (and why its not going away any time soon).

The first step to buying a house if find out if, in principle, you can get a mortgage. This was easy - Yes. Banks were tearing our hands off to say yes, subject to checks, they would love to give us a 90% mortgage. The next step for us was to then get the other 10% for the deposit. This we did the cheats way - i.e. we borrowed it from a different bank because we don't have the patients to save.

Third step is find the house and get the owner to accept an offer. This is a stupidly time-consuming task. I am writing this blog post on the first Saturday morning I have't had to get up to go view houses in 8 weeks. We saw a grand total of 27 houses, luckily one of those was 'the one'. And everyone was right - The moment I stepped through the front door I knew this one was different, and by the time I had been to the bottom of the garden and through all the rooms I knew. And that was that, I was having that house. Getting an offer accepted took a further 2 weeks of hell. Waiting for the phone to ring, chasing solicitors and mortgage brokers. Luckily for me my new boss is extremely understanding and she hasn't said a word about me answering my phone at work. Finally we got an offer accepted, about £2500 more than we really wanted but the house is worth it.

Forth step turned out to be the real bitch, and largely because we didn't see the problems coming. Remember all those banks, desperate to lend us money subject to checks? Well it turned out that these were more SUBJECT TO CHECKS and these checks declared Joni and my borrowing too high, wages too low and generally just bad people to lend 90% value of a house to. But they would do an 85% mortgage giving me a heart attack on the the phone, and both of us 1 afternoon to find £5000. Due to the brilliance that  is Joni's financial planning, we actually did it. We called the mortgage broker back and told her to go ahead with it. What followed was the tense-ist 18 hours of my life but at 10:30am on Friday the broker called to say it had all been approved. New home, here we come!

Now I don't want to put a dampener on things but there is still 6 weeks to wait, approximatly. During which any number of a huge list of things can go wrong - The mortgage people can still change their minds about lending us money. The banks valuer can decide the house isn't worth what we are paying, or find some major problem. The solicitors can find some major problem. The owner can change is mind and withdraw, someone else can come along and offer more money than us. BUT if all these things don't happen you are all invited to the house warming in spring!

As promised, here are some pictures of (hopefully) our new home:

The one thing I'm never aloud to say, said more eloquently than I could ever manage.

In the weekend section of the Guardian newspaper they have a shorts section each week called "What I'm Really Thinking". This week my mum gave this to me and suggested I read it. What it said spoke to me in such a profound way I felt I had to share with with all my fans. Reading this article it felt like someone had reached into my heart and pulled out all those things I'm too cynical, too sarcastic, too defensive to say. I genuinely think it will have changed the way I express myself and in some ways that makes me sad. Below I present what I'm really thinking, but could never find the words to say:

I wish I could meet this person, I think we would be friends. I'd like to think we could go to the gym together and get coffee (....cake) together and not feel like we have to justify each others life choices with every conversation. To not slowly descend into a characature of yourself because it doesn't sit right with people - no normal woman could have made this choice. 

More than anything else this article scares me, actually. To read and write in to the Guardian (not to mention have your own home gym) suggests the writer is a fair bit older than me. I dream of the day people stop asking when I will change my mind, raise their eyebrows when I say I don't want children. "I bet you will have more children than the rest of us" is the phrase I hear most in my life. I wonder if anyone has ever considered how degrading it is to constantly have one of your life's biggest choices belittled on an almost weekly basis? If I took up going to church and people laughed and asked when I would give that up time and time again, you would be labelled bigoted or racist. 

If this writers experience is anything to go by I might have more years of defending myself than I would like.