You may have noticed that I’ve been very quiet on the blogging front lately. I wrote a couple of posts in December, but apart from that, I pretty much took the whole of the month off to enjoy Christmas with my family. We had a wonderful Christmas together - we spent Christmas Day at home, and it was amazing to see both boys so excited about it all. I think Max has reached peak Christmas excitement age, and Ben seems so much more into it all than I remember Max being at his age. But then I suspect the excitement of his older brother rubs off on him quite a lot!

But there is another reason why I’ve been so quiet. I wrote late last year about our home renovation plans - a big project which would see us adding an extension to our kitchen, but also moving our staircase and rearranging the whole of our upstairs layout. It really is a huge undertaking, and will essentially involve gutting our house. At the time I wrote that post, we’d selected our builders and were envisioning starting the work somewhere around September 2019. But at the start of December, I got an email from our builders, to say that they’d had a project slip, and had a slot available from 2nd January - would we like to take it?

I’ll be honest, my first reaction was a big NO! I’m a huge planner, and the thought of starting the work in that short space of time felt like a huge thing to me. But the builders explained that we wouldn’t have to move out for the first 6 weeks, leaving only 10 weeks where we would have to be out of the house. And my lovely parents offered to have us stay with them, meaning the pressure of trying to find a short term let was taken away. The appeal of having the work all done and completed by the start of the summer was massive, and after a bit of discussion, we decided to be brave and spontaneous (something that is totally not me) and said yes!

It’s been a really busy month, getting funds arranged with our mortgage provider, party wall agreements sorted (who knew you needed them, even if you don’t actually have adjoining walls?), and building control notices in, but we are finally all sorted and work has started.

The project started with a very stressful first week, where our expected mortgage funds didn’t come through, party wall agreements had still not been agreed, and my cheque to the council for Building Control got returned as I’d not written the correct numbers on it… But a week later, those issues are all sorted, and work is moving ahead quickly.

I’m hoping to write regular updates on our progress - I’m sure they won’t be full of pretty pictures, but I know I love following a good renovation project. If you’d like to get a better idea of our plans, I’ve created a ‘before’ house tour video, where I talk about the work that we’re planning. It’s my first ever Youtube video, so please be kind!