It was all going so well...

Our house sale/purchase had been progressing scarily well. Draft contracts had been prepared, searches had been completed. I admit, I was daydreaming about being in for Christmas, opening presents and having lunch in our new home.

And then today, we received a letter from the bank saying that we need to get a structural engineer's report on some cracks in the house we're buying, as they are possibly a sign of movement and subsidence.. I think we were expecting it, as we'd noticed the cracks ourselves, but it still came as a shock. So now everything is grinding to a halt while we get the report done.

We're gutted, and thinking the worst in all honesty, but we're so far down the road now that we'll just have to see it through and see what needs to be done once we hear back from the structural engineer. I just hope our buyers are prepared to wait!

Chatty girl

Daisy's speech is coming on leaps and bounds at the moment. I'm amazed by how much she can say - I'm sure Jamie was at least 2 before he said much at all apart from mama and dadda (possibly not true, I think he said more but I can't remember!). The benefits of being a girl! Here are a few of the words and phrases she uses:

Sit down
Up...book...read it (when bringing a book over to be read)
Drink
Milk
Got teddy bear (when she's nicked it off Jamie)
Na night
Daddy
Pushchair
Shower
Jumper (pronounced "humper" )
Raining
Tights
Oh dear shoe (when removing said shoe and lobbing it on the floor)
Up
Down
Yep
Noooo
Horsey
Light
Peepo

There are loads more. She also does renditions of "Row, row your boat" and "twinkle twinkle" - obviously not saying all the words properly but you can tell what she means.

 My favourite though, is the way when she wakes up in the morning or from her nap, she starts calling, "Haymie, Haymie" and we all know who she wants to see!

We bought a house today!

So about a week ago, my mum told us about a house that would be coming on the market in our preferred area - she'd found out about it through a friend of the vendors. We bugged the agents for a few days, and yesterday we finally got to go and see it - we were the first to do so. It had some massive positives - HUGE garden, lovely road very close to the primary school, good sized bedrooms, scope to extend...and also some negatives - in need of a lot of updating, downstairs bathroom. Anyway, we loved it, and decided straight away that it was the house for us. I know you're supposed to go about this house-buying lark with a cool head and should never show how much you love a house, but all that went out the window and we decided yesterday evening that we would make an offer.

So this morning, after some last minute chats with Wayne and my mum, I phoned and made an offer, a little bit under the asking price. Soon after, we got a "no"...so I decided there and then to offer the asking price. I may have slightly taken leave of my senses and got carried away, but it paid off and an agonising hour later, the agents phoned and said our offer had been accepted!

Now we have all the paperwork, legal stuff, surveys, etc, to plough through, but every now and again I imagine us next summer, in that massive garden, the kids having loads of space to run around, plus room for veg patches, chickens, playhouses, trampolines.... I am trying not to get carried away, as I know things might go wrong, but I can't help it and I'm SO excited about us moving in!