We've been discussing moving house for a while now, to take us back to the Midlands, closer to L's family and our closest set of friends. It'll mean moving further from my family, but I've been privileged to be closer to them for the last 6 (sorry, 8 ! forgot the time we were in Ipswich before moving to this house) years, and for us three as a family, I think it will be a good move. This house is great, but with L working from home now and a growing family we need more room! The whole thing makes me feel quite nervous, mainly how we will manage it with a baby, but even if things move quickly, the conveyancing process itself could take a few months, so starting things now is looking towards a move mid to late summer and Z will be getting on for 6 months by then.
Our plans had been to start the process about a year ago, however 'someone' got pregnant in the meantime and then it just too complicated thinking about changing medical and midwifery care in the middle, and physically managing to move house with me heavily pregnant.
But now the boy is here we're looking at it again and scary of scary have put the house on the market!
We've been looking at houses in the Midlands and have found that we can afford the size and kind of house we want for what we can afford (which is lucky!) and have made some appointments to view next weekend. We've also had two estate agents round to value our house - sadly given the current market conditions, the price isn't what we'd hoped, but then this is probably reflective across the country and may be why we can get more for our money than we thought we might when buying. Articles like this are always scary. The interesting thing was that the first agent warned us heavily that he was giving us a conservative estimate of price and then the second agent came in below that even! The second agent also seemed to be positively encouraging us to stay put unless we had any time constraints on moving and in fact seemed reluctant to take the house on. So surprisingly enough we went with the first one. Both of them were full of stories of doom and gloom amongst estate agents though - offices closing in the town, withdrawing adverts from local papers... It doesn't sound good, but we're going to give it a go. The saving grace is that because L works from home, he is able to keep his current job when we move, so there are no hassles with trying to time moving with him ending one job and starting another. This should hopefully give us a bit of flexibility if we find that our house doesn't get the kind of offers we need to be able to afford the next house.
It's all such a minefield! But the board has gone up and the agent is coming back today to take details, get us on Rightmove and take some initial external pictures. We need to do some severe tidying up before the internal ones are taken, but with any luck he can show us where he thinks he'll take the pictures and we can selectively tidy!
Deep breath. Calm.
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