Re-prioritising Life

Last week, as I mentioned, we heard that the house we wanted to buy had been sold to someone else. Having been told that we would sell our house in a matter of weeks at the price we decided to sell, this has not happened and we are now quite tired of the whole enterprise.

So what next?

We, we have considered what we need, what we have and what we want to do in the next 10 years or so and come to the same conclusion that we did before which is that we don't need to move house. However, we have now decided that we don't need to more and therefore we won't move, but we will finalise the renovations that our house needs to fulfil our needs.

We want to finish the basement so that we can use it as part of the living space for the house with some office and living space down there and a better space for handling washing and things. We also need to replace the garage with something we can use as a workshop/bike storage which will be secure and practical. We also need a double width drive to avoid swapping the cars around all the time. We quite quickly came up with this list (tenders are invited!)

• Repair roof and chimney
• Add insulation to roof
• Replace hall floor
• Repaint all whitewashed ceilings along with living room ceiling
• Build new (brick built) garage/workshop
• Widen drive and repave it
• Tile basement floor
• Change heating system and radiators
• Replace basement door and windows and old doors and windows in house
• Improve lighting and wiring in the basement for living requirements
• Decorate basement and everywhere else in due course
• Fit a new bathroom

It's a lot of work but we don't need to do it all at once and we can spend the next 5 years working on it but I think we are agreed that we can fit into the house we have and will get some satisfaction from telling the estate agent to get lost.