We're Moving Again

Yep. It's true. We're moving house! It's all very exciting and I've been holding onto this news for months, but we're moving to a new house and I couldn't be happier! If you follow me on Instagram or Twitter, you may have seen that I've lightly mentioned buying a new house and that we've had a few bumps we've had along the way. It's been a little bit of a roller coaster for nearly a year, but we're just waiting for some paperwork to be completed and confirm everything. Normally, I'd wait until everything is official before I begin to talk about big things like this - and I'm hoping this won't jinx it but with COVID-19, I don't know when we're moving and I'm just so excited about it that I really wanted to start blogging about it now. I've held off for long enough!

We totally overlooked that moving house would be affected by this virus and we thought we'd be in our new home by now. We're so close to completion and we've had so much go wrong already, it couldn't possibly get any worse. (Well, it could but let's not go there, yeah?) Because of all this, I thought it would be good to create a Moving Diary series where I talk about my experience buying and selling, the process and how we get along with moving. Hopefully writing about all this can help out anyone else who may have a similar experience or who might like to be more prepared for buying and selling a home and any bumps they might have in the road. You know.. just in case. 

Why are we moving? 

Almost two years ago, my boyfriend and I bought our first home together. We love this house and everything about it but for personal reasons, it's become too far from home for either of us and our commutes to work are just way too long. With all this in mind, we decided that it was time to move on and last year, we put it up on the market and started shopping for something new.

We only live just over 20 miles away from our parent's homes and at first, we thought the distance would be fine but because we're both so close to our families, we started to feel the distance quickly. We can see them whenever we want to but the drive is so time-consuming, expensive and takes up so much our free time. And now that we're a little more settled financially, we can afford to move to our preferred town which is halfway between here and there. Living closer means we could see our families more often, for longer and more than half our travel time and expenses.

Photo credit: La Miko

The other reason we decided to sell is that our move near-on doubled our journey time to work. I love listening to the Sh**ed, Married, Annoyed podcast and my 90s music playlists but not to the point where the podcast episode is finished or my playlist is repeating itself. Having never lived or visited where we do now, we didn't know what traffic would be like in the mornings and journey times are unpredictable and hectic for both of us. The journey takes so much of our day already, brought up our travel costs and began to take a toll on our mental health. We both love driving but it got a little ridiculous. We value our time and don't like spending it all on the daily commute.

When did we decide to move?

Family and time are so important to both of us and it was really early on that we decided we needed to sell our first home and move. Having only lived here for just 9 months, we put the house up for sale. It was heartbreaking at first and I didn't accept it for a while because it was our first home and we were already thinking of saying goodbye to it. It didn't feel right. I didn't really want to do but I knew we had to. It was putting a strain on lives and it was more important for us to be happy living closer to home than to live in a nice house with a nice garden.

When are we moving?

Right now, we have sold our house and have a new one lined up which we're absolutely in love with (forget what I said about the house with the big garden because this one is better and I'm already over it). I'm extremely excited about it but... we have no idea when we are moving. Like I said before, our experience this time around has been tedious, heart-wrenching and unbelievably tiring and to add to that, COVID-19 has left a lot of the people involved on hold. The government announced that no one would be allowed to move during lockdown and a lot of the people working on our move can't do anything remotely anyway. Right now, we're guessing that we'll move about a month after the lockdown is lifted but we just don't know. All I hope is that everyone in the chain is unaffected by the lockdown and we can continue the sale as normal when we can.

In my next post, I'll be sharing our story so far on buying and selling our home as it differs so much from the first time around. Hopefully, sharing our story can help others in their journey avoid some of the issues we've come across as I haven't been able to find many posts or stories with similar situations. Despite having bought before, we've never sold, so it's a different experience entirely. Still, we are both really excited about this move because the house we're buying is everything we wanted and in the right location too. It's most definitely a nicer house with a nice garden and I'm dying to finalise paperwork and move in already.

I hope you'll stick around for the series and read our story. Despite the fact it's been a crazy journey so far, I'm really excited about this and I've learnt so much from the experience that I hope I can share with you.