To Move or not to Move

Our lives seem to be in a permanent state of upheaval. Living with a teenager and two preschoolers will do that to you. The last few weeks were particularly stressful.

We rent our home, while this is not  the ideal situation for us, it nevertheless is the situation we find ourselves in. Renting has it's upside though, if the washing machine packs in or the roof starts to leak we just call the agent and someone comes to fix it, at no extra expense.

We signed another year's lease in March, but last week the agent contacted us and said that the couple who own our home would like to return to it, and asked us if we would be happy to move. We weighed up the pros and cons and decided that as we would likely be out at the end of our tenancy in February so we decided to start looking. We love this house, in particular the fantastic view from our deck.

It's not clear from this but we can see the shipyard with it's iconic yellow cranes Samson and Goliath and the Titanic Belfast Building, and the George Best Airport. There is also a huge oil rig( centre right), currently under repair. The view is much better in the winter when the trees are bare, and we have a fantastic view of all the firework displays at Halloween.

We began looking in East Belfast, but actually Holywood had a lot more to offer. The first house I fell for was in Cultra, in a leafy lane 5 minutes from the beach and work. unfortunately we were just beaten to the application stage by someone who was ready to move this week.,

In between falling in love again I saw a variety of scruffy or impractical homes, or townhouses that are designed for goodness knows who, living room upstairs, bedrooms downstairs, higgledy-piggledy up and down stairs,dreadful, odd shaped rooms and no storage.

The second house  I fell for was lovely too, ticked a lot of boxes for us, space, storage, convenience and price.
 cute isn't it?

So on Friday our agent called my DOH and told him the landlady had changed her mind and was buying another property! Phew? or No! We were already psyched to move and DD1 and OH had started clearing out. *Sigh*

After some thought we decided to stay put, we love our home and our children are close to school, nursery and family. We decided to start clearing out as if we are moving though and so far have the garage and the attic cleared of rubbish and looking a lot more like a home rather than a storage facility.

Guess what? the agent for house #2 called this morning saying they would like us as tenants *sigh*.