My husband asked me yesterday how I was feeling. I’d been ambushed by a lurgy, nothing which could be named but just something which made me fee like **** – not in a major way, just in a bleagh way. It was unfortunate that it was around my birthday – but we went out for a birthday breakfast and we carried on with our purge to tidy and sort the house. By the morrow, where there was nothing on the agenda, I spent most of the day in bed, and the following day just slobbing around but trying to continue with the housework.
You may wonder why me of all people would be trying to attend to chores when I was feeling more than a little not myself, but the truth is we have been trying, half-heartedly to sell our house and move. Nightmare. No other word, and I say no more. So now, four days later we are putting all our anxiety and fed-upness to one side as what will be will be (channelling Doris Day) and trying to carry on as normal but trying to be more tidy and houseproud.
Today is Thursday so today is quiz-night. Now quiz-night was always Tuesday when it was in our beloved Dolphin, however, times change, and now we are Shippers, and our quiz night is Thursday in the splendid Ship Inn. Having charged ourselves with a fine pint of Otter and a glass of red, we ascended to what has become our usual table on what might be called the mezzanine area of the oldest pub in the area and awaited the arrival of our team – the same team as so often triumphed in the Dolphin. Two of the gang were absent but there were four of us setting to with the four rounds – a picture round,a question round, a music round and another set of questions.
As ever, we enjoyed each others company, scratched our heads over the elusive answers of the questions we knew that we knew. We had a very pleasant evening, chatting about all sorts of things as well as the questions, and came about halfway through the ranking when the results were called. We hope next week our other team-mates will be with us, and we know we will have an enjoyable and fun evening!
Lois Elsden 
At the beginning of 2024, we decided to sell our house and after a massive declutter, tidy-up and redecoration, it went in the market in April. OMG what a shenanigans! The whole system is a nightmare, not fit for purpose and by the end of 2023 we decided to stay put! We looked at our house as if we are moving into it now, instead of 30 years ago, and what should we do with it to make it suitable for our lifestyles now. And it seems to have worked. We’ve done another declutter, moved a lot of furniture around, re-designated rooms and we’re much happier in how we occupy this space. Apparently Scotland has a much better system of house sales, but England and Wales have a completely broken one imo
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Thanks for this – really helpful. It is indeed incredibly stressful, both of us with books and husb with music stuff and ALL HIS ART STUFF!! I think we’re now considering staying put – and do exactly what you’ve said about making the house work for us. The only thing is the stairs, I think it’s too narrow for a stair lift should we ever need one, so I’m thinking of planning the dinning room to be a downstairs bedroom if necessary and converting the downstairs loo to a shower room.
Yes Scotland is the way ahead for house-sales. My daughter has moved to Newport and everything went like a dream (but she is very organised and sensible unlike me) – she absolutely loves being there, loves everything about it!
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Sensible. We’ve reorganised our downstairs living room so it can be quickly converted to a bedroom. We have a downstairs shower room but we’re going to upgrade it with a lower shower and add a bidet. Our main (front) bedroom upstairs, which is the biggest room in the house, has now become our main living area as it was largely wasted being a bedroom, we didn’t need all that space to sleep in. It’s been fun re-thinking the house in this way, really enjoying it.
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That’s really interesting, because I’ve been wondering whether we could do something similar here – we have a large dining room at the back of the house which could become a bed-sitting room, and our downstairs loo needs an upgrade anyway, so maybe converting to a bathroom would be even better and add value to the house! So far this process has been more anxiety inducing than fun, but a project like that would be positive! (we still need to get rid of stuff though!!!)
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The getting rid of stage is hard when you start it, but it gets easier.
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We will press on!!
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