What an exciting day

Tuesday:

We had professional photos taken of the house this morning, so we did our best to remove all traces of human habitation. Not so much real cleaning or packing, more stashing stuff we actually use away in drawers. Hide that shampoo! The buyers must not know we have hair! Get rid of the dish drainer, there must be no evidence that we wash dishes in this house! Etc. It does look nice with everything hidden away, not an easy way to live though.

Then it was time to switch into home-buying mode. Tim made an offer on the house we want. They called back with a counter offer. After discussing it with me, Tim accepted their counter-offer! So exciting! Our purchase is contingent on an acceptable building and pest inspection report, which will be available on Thursday. Assuming that is all good, we have a house!

As I have said, the home's flaw is that it is smaller than others we were looking at. Actually most of the rooms are a good size but it is missing one room so I won't get a study. Since I work from home, that is a fault. But hopefully in a couple of years we can build on another room at the back for Aiden so he will get a bigger bedroom before he's a teenager, and I will get the study then. In the meantime, my desk will be in a nice corner looking out into the garden.

Aside from that one flaw, which perhaps I have harped on too much, the house is really lovely. It has the best bathrooms of any house we have seen and a nice big kitchen. The whole house felt very welcoming. I felt it even from the pictures on the internet, and Tim agreed as soon as we walked in. Very well maintained. The garden doesn't have much lawn, it is mainly native trees and shrubs and flowers in chaotic profusion, fun to explore, like a tiny bit of natural bushland. The previous owners (who are retiring to a country town, I guess they are moderately elderly) were obviously keen on wildlife, they had feeders out for the birds and even cubes of meat for the kookaburras (which usually eat snakes). We saw a beautiful rainbow lorikeet in a flowering grevillea tree out the front as we were leaving. It is in a quiet dead-end street, walking distance to shops and the library and possibly to the schools. Lovely!

Tim and I are both utterly exhausted emotionally. Time to collapse. But it was a very exciting and productive day.

.. And extra bit of exciting news, Tim's cousin has just purchased land near where we are moving to. He was previously an hour away. Lovely family gathering.