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belonging
October 2008 
This week's our house anniversary!
Posted on Sep 1st, 2008
by 
Susan
Susan
This is in Response to the Questions and Reflections for September 01, 2008:
We've been here two years, almost to the day. We closed at the end of August and moved in a few days later.
We'd been looking at houses for a few years, looking for something we could afford that wasn't too dismal. Every week during that time I would drive home from the estate agent's office, which took me past a lovely big stone house with a sunroom on it, surrounded by trees and gardens, just on the road but mostly screened from it, with a big FOR SALE sign in front of it.
Well, I'd think. It must be lovely to be able to afford something like THAT.
Then one day I was flipping through one of the regional property magazines, and...THERE was the stone house. The price wasn't half what I thought it would be. It was still out of our range, but maaaaybe....
We went to look at it. My heart broke the moment I walked in the door. It was rustic in a beautiful way: ceiling beams, great stone fireplaces, original windows with those deep, deep sills you only get with four-foot thick stone walls. It was cool and quiet inside and ...*home*. I knew that if we couldn't have it, it would be the house I remembered all my life, to wonder about.
"I need it," I said.
Oh no, my husband's face said.
Even better, it had two acres with it , three stone outbuildings and its own river, and no neighbours in sight; the ones just beyond the hill were famously nice. And, it was only two miles from the village; we could walk.
The down side was, there were only two bedrooms and there was only a shower, no bathtub, in the bathroom. Still, that's what kept the price down, so we scrambled to find the cash. We pulled it in from everywhere, to add to our savings of five years, and sold a car. We were just a thousand or so short, when we remembered something wonderful: the annual respite care grant would be coming in, in just two weeks, giving us exactly enough for the down payment. So we offered.
I still love it, which is a good thing because I hate moving. We've been fixing it up, adding a bathtub and a new water system, etc., and I've sworn that if I ever move out of THIS house, it will be IN a box, not carrying one. (I hope that's not for a long long time!)
LOL
We'd been looking at houses for a few years, looking for something we could afford that wasn't too dismal. Every week during that time I would drive home from the estate agent's office, which took me past a lovely big stone house with a sunroom on it, surrounded by trees and gardens, just on the road but mostly screened from it, with a big FOR SALE sign in front of it.
Well, I'd think. It must be lovely to be able to afford something like THAT.
Then one day I was flipping through one of the regional property magazines, and...THERE was the stone house. The price wasn't half what I thought it would be. It was still out of our range, but maaaaybe....
We went to look at it. My heart broke the moment I walked in the door. It was rustic in a beautiful way: ceiling beams, great stone fireplaces, original windows with those deep, deep sills you only get with four-foot thick stone walls. It was cool and quiet inside and ...*home*. I knew that if we couldn't have it, it would be the house I remembered all my life, to wonder about.
"I need it," I said.
Oh no, my husband's face said.
Even better, it had two acres with it , three stone outbuildings and its own river, and no neighbours in sight; the ones just beyond the hill were famously nice. And, it was only two miles from the village; we could walk.
The down side was, there were only two bedrooms and there was only a shower, no bathtub, in the bathroom. Still, that's what kept the price down, so we scrambled to find the cash. We pulled it in from everywhere, to add to our savings of five years, and sold a car. We were just a thousand or so short, when we remembered something wonderful: the annual respite care grant would be coming in, in just two weeks, giving us exactly enough for the down payment. So we offered.
I still love it, which is a good thing because I hate moving. We've been fixing it up, adding a bathtub and a new water system, etc., and I've sworn that if I ever move out of THIS house, it will be IN a box, not carrying one. (I hope that's not for a long long time!)
LOL
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