We did it! (we think we did, anyway). You know there was a house that stole my heart and you know we didn’t get it, and it was back to the drawing board with less money than we had hoped for owing to exchange rates and tricky mortgage conditions and stamp duty (poke me in my heart with a sharp stick while I am bleeding out, why doncha) and everything was all about bitter compromise and developer-grey ugliness with a side of bad transport connections and too little floorspace?

Well, then that husband of mine sent me a message one Saturday about two months ago telling me to click on a link because he had found “the coolest 70s house”, and, Dear Reader, he had. So we visited the next day, only to find a whole detached 1930s house in a conservation area that had been done up in the 70s and EVERYTHING WAS STILL THERE – smoked glass cabinets, teak panelling, Heals furniture, paisley curtains, bronze textured wallpaper, cork lino, LEMON YELLOW TOILET AND BASIN, and pendant sputnik lights. There’s five bedrooms and a garden, with a garage, a sukkah room for Jewish festivities, a loft that would swell the place from 2200 square foot to a whole lot more. And it’s five minutes from the tube, with two lines – two stops to Baker Street or 20 minutes to Bond Street, and there’s an outstanding primary school five minutes from the front door (with Remi on the waiting list of three). We put in an offer two days later and tomorrow we do the exchanging of contracts which seems to be kind of sealing the deal (the system here is weird and slow and confusing).

It’s in Wembley which will take a bit to get used to, because, you know, 20 something years larging it up in Bayswater does funny things to one’s perspective and sense of normal. Like, Portobello Road Saturday morning strolls and Hyde Park being just over there, and Paddington Station two streets from the flat and Bradley Cooper/Woody Allen/Naomi Watts/Anthony Hopkins/Emma Thompson in our garden. The community, oh the community – the people everywhere who say hello on the way to get your Sunday morning paper, the friends who you met when dropping your kids off at nursery who are now parents of university students, the people you met through the dog. The neighbourhood which keeps changing shape, the restaurants that come and go, but you and your family are the constant. The hospital next to the station where all your babies were born; the doctor, the dentist, the schools. Our communal garden, that dear, precious, strange, beautiful, charmed ecosystem which gave us rest, play, lost afternoons, evenings where the band played and the fireworks took off, where we danced and drank and ate cake and cheese and drank tea and read the paper and kissed and survived the lockdowns. All part of our world – the children have never known anything else – which looks set to blow itself up.

There’s mixed feelings. It feels right, but underwhelming. Scary. And I was hoping for some Victorian tiles and a staircase and hidden fireplaces with original tiled surrounds. I wanted to be closer to our friends and our (old?) life so it didn’t have to feel so different. I wanted a Georgian wreck. I feel like I’m going to reenter suburbia and the interiors I grew up with.

Anyway. Wish us luck, I guess?

My phone made a slightly awkward video complete with sentimental music from the photos I took last time:

Here’s me with Charlotte, the wise Charlotte, with the best taste in interiors so she has to come along on all potential house visits:

The backyard (complete with adorable teens) which could for sure be turned into a Slim Aarons setup (note the sukkah room to the right):

The sobering bad news is that the mortgage is twice the rent, so, erm, no idea how to cover the extra. Spending less seems to be a solution but the thought of a budget brings me out in hives. Less childcare, no Waitrose, get a lodger? There’ll be more costs in transport but presumably we will be so happy with all the extra space we won’t ever go out again? Heating costs will probably suck. And will I get all DIY-ish and strip paint/rip up carpets? Time will tell. This is when everyone says to me

‘But just look at who you married – a real life builder-type-person!’

and I say

‘You know what they say about the cobbler’s children’…and the crowd goes silent.

Time will tell.

What else? Christmas was a lovely Devon-shaped week off, with that extra mysterious week afterwards where we threw parties and ate the leftover ham plus all the extra ham we could get from the reduced section. There was swimming and pulled pork and sleep-ins (Christmas morning didn’t kick off until 9am which signals the end of something quite big) and a trip to the tiny church to swell the congregation to double the usual numbers:

A little Woollacombe beach dune action:

An adorable teen shot from our Portobello Road excursion yesterday:

And this week it’s been all about Remi, darling Remi, who turned six on Thursday with a Friday night party complete with water balloons, pass the parcel, McDonalds, a whole roasted lamb leg, two cakes, and of course cheese:

Mark and I reached our 27th wedding anniversary and went out to The Park for dinner, only to get a bit argumentative when we started to discuss packing up the flat. It’s a sore point which delves into accusations of hoarding. But the rest of the evening was v nice, thanks. Here we are before we had three storage facilities, an overcrowded flat we are being forced to leave, and six children:

Big news, eh? Big house-y news. There will be plenty more of this, once the deal is certain. I expect I will get quite into kitchen plans (currently lusting after a larder and a bar) and Mark will be itching to convert the loft. For the first time ever we can have people to stay with us.

You’ll come all the way out to Wembley, right?