Moving on Up

So I haven’t blogged in a while and that’s because I’ve been rather busy moving house – like you do in the middle of a global pandemic. They do say a house move can be as stressful as having a baby, marrying, or divorce. Having only experienced two of those (marriage and baby), I can say whilst at times it’s been frenetic and I’ve only had one minor meltdown, overall it’s not been too bad. Mainly because, for many reasons, we avoided buying one and selling the other house on the same day. Not the usual way of doing things, but then that’s us as a family and it’s come with it’s own advantages and disadvantages, as I’ll explain.

The last time we bought and sold a house was 20 years ago and we bought from a friend and sold to a friend. We also had a very small amount of stuff, no children, moved only a small distance up the road and had tonnes more energy between us. Again not entirely typical, but pretty stress free all in all. Since then I’ve heard of long chains collapsing on the last day and other horror stories and so given my mental health has not been brilliant in the last few years (which is a rather large understatement), I very much wanted to avoid such nightmare scenarios, if at all possible.

As it is, we’ve been looking for many months, even years, for that ‘life changing’ property in either the Lake District (Cumbria), or the Peak District (Derbyshire). Ostensibly so we could be nearer our families as our parents grew older. The list of requirements was pretty simple, a house with some land, somewhere to work from home for each of us and a local pub in walking distance being the top three. We finally found ‘the one’ in October last year, typically, right in the middle of Covid. Unfortunately my daughter had not finished college in Cambridge, so this is where the ‘split’ came in. We did our calculations on the back of an envelope (ok, so it was in the notes section on my iPhone), and worked out, we could just about afford both for the required period, allowing us to hold onto our Cambridge house until she finished her A-levels. Overall it was going to cost us more than the traditional way of doing things, but for us, it just felt like the right thing to do. So we made an offer and it was accepted.

Gulp, we then called the teen, who promptly fell off her chair. Why the surprise? we asked. The reply was typically her “well you’ve been talking about it for so long, I never thought you’d actually do it.” Not what we expected her reaction to be at all, but then teens can be surprising like that. Then came the telling the friends moment – difficult in lock-down as we couldn’t all be together. One found out by accident, my hubby letting it slip on a socially distanced walk. She burst into tears, but promised not to divulge until we found the appropriate moment to tell the others. Not the easiest thing I’ve done, but we as haven’t kept our long term plans secret over the years, so there was some understanding at least.

Covid was the main driver for making the move in the end weirdly. Zoom calls becoming something everyone just does now and so we were sure we’d be able to manage the distance back to our main social circle. Over the years we’ve also made friends who live right across the UK and right across the world indeed, so we are pretty confident we’ll stay in touch with those special people in our lives, whatever the situation that may come between us.

As it is, whilst we actively avoided the main cause of house move stress, that last day carnage, on reflection I think what we’ve ended up doing is spreading it out more thinly, but over a longer period of time. Unforeseen costs have stretched the budget, for example I miscalculated the stamp duty because we are now classed as owning a ‘second property’. Something which, coming from a working class background, I find quite amusing for a very short moment in time. Although a rebate can be applied for, the day we found that out was not a good one on the pocket, or from a husband/wife relationship point of view.

That has been tested in unforeseen ways also, we’ve disagreed about when to tell friends, and family, debating between the extremes of when we had our offer accepted, to when we received the searches back, as we exchanged, or even up to completion. We’ve also managed traveling back and forwards between the two places differently, one of us preferring to stay up there more than the other. Disagreeing not on how beautiful it is, or if we made the right decision (that was never in doubt), but on how long the teen should be left in the Cambridge house without us (she having a say in the matter obviously).

In fact everything has not at all been as expected, though I’m not sure how making a move like this, from houses of very different ages, styles and locations, in the middle of a global pandemic, could ever have been 100% predictable. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure I couldn’t have handled it all a few years ago, where everything in my life had to be planned to the nth degree, change was not managed/taken well and when my anxieties were at their height.

The sum total of the last 18 months (or so) of self-reflection, counseling, of the support from my family and friends to implement changes in the way I see and react to the world, has allowed me to manage in a way. It hasn’t been ‘perfect’ by any stretch, it has been very physically tiring and emotional at times. I’ve had to fight the urge to need everything that needs doing ‘done at once’, to accept the situation ‘as is’ when something has changed, or arisen unexpectedly. I’ve felt at times ‘discombobulated’ by having half of our things in two different places, but nothing being whole, completed, or settled. Yo-yo-ing up and down the M1 motorway every few days with a pocket book full of lists of items to “take back down” and to “bring up next time” and usually with a car boot full of washing. However this time when I felt the ‘unease’ start to happen, those internal feelings of anxiety starting to grow insidiously, I asked for help from my amazing family. Before allowing, as has occurred in the past, for the emotions to well up and overtake me, usually exploding out of me at the most innocuous of moment or happening. All in all I couldn’t have managed, like I’ve been able to, without the love of my life, my husband, who of course has been on his own emotional roller coaster. And whilst it hasn’t been ideal for the teen, she’s done amazingly well also. Only dropping into the conversation on a few occasions that “we’ve ruined her last summer of freedom” with a dramatic swish of the arms to emphasize what ‘awful’ parents we are.

Of course we know we’re extremely lucky to be able to have the opportunity for such a once in a lifetime move, to be able to hold onto both houses at once and to have the support of those around us to do so. This article therefore is not about the house move in itself, but about the process we’ve been through. Not all paths through life have to follow convention, not all big changes have to come at the perfect time. And not all plans are the best laid plans of mice and men. The important thing is to do something with your life, or personal circumstances, that makes you happy, that you want to do, for life is too short (see my article on grief for evidence of that should you need it) to spend it talking about what you might do, or what you’re going to do in the future. No matter how hard making such a life-style change might appear to be, it is just the same as taking a series of steps – tackling one problem at a time. Just like climbing Everest, or walking round the world. Both of which, seemingly impossible tasks, have been accomplished.

And as things are starting to get settled and the yo-yo-ing motion has started to calm down, I am able to get my head around writing again. Just with a very different view from my desk this time.