Where to start???

I've been so busy this last couple of weeks I literally haven't had a moment to myself.  I mentioned in an earlier post I think that my husband is determined to live on a farm in a rural location, close to where he grew up.  This isn't as bad as it sounds as the area is only a 10 minute drive from our current home and civilisation. 

Well...for the past two years we've had an ongoing relationship with a derelict farmhouse and land in a lovely location that we've wanted to buy. Initially we tried to buy the farmhouse and a converted barn, the two lots are part of the same property and both come with land (the vendor wouldn't sell them separately), but the bank decided to up the interest rate it had initially offered us and put us on less favourable terms (due to the recession biting) so we had to pull out...I was relieved as I had felt that it was going to be a stretch for us and we would have no wriggle room if things went wrong in any way.

We again suggested that we would buy the farmhouse & land lot, but were again told they were not going to sell them separately for fear that if their was development work going on next door they wouldn't be able to sell the barn conversion!

Anyway...low and behold two weekends ago a brochure comes in the post for the self same farmhouse! The vendor has now sold the barn and is asking for informal tenders on the farmhouse! How annoying! Now instead of negotiating a price with the vendor we have to go in blind with our top offer, possibly paying far more than we would otherwise have to as we will have no idea whether there are even any other offers never mind how much they might be.

Since receiving this brochure we have put our house on the market and have spent the past two weeks painting and refurnishing the childrens bedrooms (which was desperately overdue) in the hopes of making these two quite small and slightly dark rooms look light spacious and airy!! (It's actually worked if you can believe that...amazing the amount of clutter that builds up over the years).

I've also spent an enormous amount of time organising and decluttering our office...I'm a terrible one for keeping every receipt from anything I've ever bought...every instruction manual...every little treasure ever brought home from school. I also ran my own business for a few years so I have mountains of that paperwork to store.  It took a super-human effort...but I did it.

My husband is the sort who despises deadlines in his home life...I think they stress him out, so his way of coping is to think...well it's not important so I won't worry about it...well we had our very first viewers booked in this morning...a couple who have nothing to sell was all we knew about them. So I decided that the deadline for decorating the bedrooms and sorting the office was Friday night so that I could do a good old clean this morning. Well hubby thought...'naaahhh, not gonna be possible, not enough time'...so guess who did most of the work ME! I wasn't too pleased with the non-cooperation but we got there in the end and I've never worked so hard and sweated so much or moved so fast as I have this week...but by 10:45 (viewers arriving at 11:00) It was all done. Phew!

The viewers walked up the front path...a retired couple...the lady was hobbling badly with a cane and was quickly out of breath...our house is definitely more a family home than anything else and it is on a large plot hence lots of mowing and gardening.  The lady was out of breath long before she reached the bottom of the stairs and I was quite worried as to whether she was actually safe to go up as she wasn't at all steady on her feet...needless to say I'm not expecting an offer! Oh well...at least it spurred me on to finish the jobs and the house is so squeaky clean now I don't know for the life of me what to do with the rest of my day!

Kidding...I just gave myself a very pampery pedicure and painted my nails...unfortunately I think I did them too thick as they aren't setting and I've already trashed one nail removing my toe spacers...I had to take them off as they were causing a lot of discomfort by that stage!

The due date for offers on the dream property is Friday 16th July...so I'll let you know how that goes! I'm quite hopeful as I've always had a feeling this was THE HOUSE, but this time around circumstances seem to be aligning themselves quite serindipidously (if that is an actual word)...soooo fingers crossed all. xxxx