A bit of a self-indulgent post, especially considering I haven’t posted for a while, but hopefully you will understand why when you hear that we have finally moved house! It seems like an eternity since I posted my, with hindsight rather premature, post about How to buy and sell a house in under 4 weeks, but we finally got the keys last Monday and are now in and settled. It feels like home already which is great!

4 Weeks to 6 Months… WTF?!?

The short version of why it took so long (aside from the fact that it can take around 3 months from offers to completion anyway) was because the chain with the initial house we put an offer in for, in the post mentioned above, fell through soon after I made the post (I jinxed it!) so we had to start looking again. This was annoying because we accepted a slightly low-ball offer on the flat to get that chain completed ASAP. Again with that lovely thing called hindsight we could have just put the flat back on the market but then again, who’s to say we would have gotten more anyway (the other option would have been to try to ask our buyer for more money once we got further down the line, but personally I think that sort of thing is a total douchebag manoeuvre). Further to finding somewhere new, which we did around mid June, we then had to find a new mortgage offer as the old one had expired. Due to the new government rules cracking down on dishing out mortgages simply based on a salary multiple and looking at affordability as well, it took a while to push through (ridiculous if you look at our bank statements but will explain in more detail in the next post). We also had to wait for our new house vendors to find somewhere to live! All of these things compounded and it just rolled on all the way to the 13th October.

Enough self-concerned words already! I know you don’t come here for that, but to finish off the post, here are a few pics and why we love our new little house so much.

Normal service will be resumed shortly – when I’ve built a few wardrobes and finished unpacking the last of the boxes!! 🙂

 

house - bathroom

OK worst pic up first… The bathroom is a little dated and is one room we will be re-doing asap! I might even give the plumbing a bash myself!

 

house - desk

A modest hallway complete with desk area and chalk board for the niece and nephew to draw on. (it kept them amused for hours, parents take note! 🙂 )

 

house - dining room

Dining room end of the lounge/diner. Table no.1 with 4 chairs was bought from a charity shop for £150 and it looks pretty nifty if you ask me!

 

house - extension

There is a small extension on the back which expands the kitchen and is a really nice space to cook and eat in. The lovely refurbished Table no.2 was bought on ebay for a mere £100 (I even managed to cram the whole thing into the TFS Mobile to avoid paying an extortionate delivery charge)

 

house - garden

The small and low maintenance garden (Perfect!) here and you can see the side of the extension as well. There is scope for a veggie patch over the back there, and we are also considering putting a chicken hutch where that manky old trampoline is after this winter. However, after reading MMM’s recent article on aquaponics, I have been pondering whether I can fit the Zero-to-Hero system over the back there!

 

house - junk room

Decent sized utility room at the front of the house (not that you can tell due to all the junk and cardboard boxes filling it up right now!)

 

house - kitchen 1

A nice compact kitchen, although with a surprising amount of cupboard space: we found all our stuff easily fit into it (even though our last kitchen was technically bigger)

house - lounge

Lounge. Only new purchases here were the coffee table (£65, on offer from furniture shop) and the rug (£85 from Next, but we had vouchers left over from the wedding so it’s not quite into the consumer sukka category of spending)

house - solar panels 2

SOLAR PANELS!!! Oh yea baby. These bad boys will be generating our electricity for at least the next 20 years. They are fully owned by us and we’ll be getting payments from the feed in tariff scheme until 2033. (We haven’t received payment or know much more about the details but I will write a post about it when I do!)


house - the shoe zone

The shoe zone. Next time Mrs TFS tells me she needs some new shoes… well you can probably guess what my reaction will be 🙂

 

house - wardrobes

The previous owners kindly left us some nice looking shabby chic style wardrobes which we will use to redecorate one of the spare rooms (which is currently a nice bright pink colour!)

 

There you go! Hope you like the pics and like I say normal posting service resumed shortly!