Monday 19 September 2011

Across the County line

Where we currently live, a few miles South of Grantham and only a couple of miles from the A1, we're just inside Lincolnshire.

By travelling only a few miles though, we can be in one of four other counties very quickly. If we go West, we'd be in Leicestershire. South, we'd be in Cambridgeshire (where I grew up and spent a lot of my life). If we go South-West we'd be in Northamptonshire or the small County of Rutland.

And now I reach the point of today's blogging - we are moving house very shortly to a village close to Oakham in Rutland. We're renting the cottage where we currently live and due to circumstances I won't repeat here, we have to continue renting for at least another year. We do want to buy another house and settle down again but our house close to Cambridge just can't be sold for a while. We only ever intended to be in this cottage for a short term tenancy of 6 months maximum. There are some things that aren't ideal for us about it and so after a rent increase, we decided to move on.

We've found a four bedroomed house (we have three at the moment) which has been fairly recently built but in an old style (which we like), we've filled in the paperwork and paid our deposit for the Agent to go through the reference checking procedure. Fingers crossed everything should be OK, our circumstances haven't changed much since we last had them done 3 years ago ....

So, we're hopefully on the move and this is why blogging has been a little sporadic, we've been clearing out cupboards and getting ready to move. It's surprising how much clutter you acquire in only 3 years! I'm feeeling quite excited now, the new house has several advantages over where we are now so if it doesn't happen, I think I'll be disapointed.

The new village has got a post office just down the road (easier for my mail order beads, most of my customers are overseas), a smaller and easier to manage garden, spacious hot working area for beadmaking and soldering in an outbuilding overlooking garden, log burner (to keep the caveman in DH happy-he likes making fire!) Both of us will have a double bedroom at the top of the house (its three stories) to use for work and so the mess and clutter of computers and my beading can be out of the way when we have visitors. The downstairs two floors are then our usual living and entertaining rooms. There are lots more dog walks locally without getting into the car as well so even Missy will like this new place better! There's also a bit of a bonus in that the new house is a few miles closer to Cambridge for my Saturday excursions to the craft market to sell my jewellery.

If all goes as planned, we should be on our way during the last week of October so if I'm a bit quiet, you know why!