Home Sweet Home

BLESS me father, for I have sinned. It's been five long months since my last confession - and by confession, I of course,  mean blog.  A lot has happened since my last post in March,  most of which I spent crying into my overpriced and unused ski boots after that disasterous 'last hurrah' holiday where himself lost his voice and I lost my patience. Fast forward five months and I am writing this blog from the comfort of my secondhand sofa in our new house, which is part of the reason why I went off the radar for a few months but also partly because I am just that lazy.
But back to the new house and yes, I am now a homeowner, in England no less. Who'd have thought it? Absolutely no one I can assure you,  if my financial track record was anything to go by,  but meeting the man of your dreams and then meeting his sensible savings plan can do strange things to a girl. One day you're making a beeline for Debenhams on payday in a taxi, the next you're debating the merits of various savings accounts at Barclays before heading home on the bus.
And so the house hunt began but no one ever tells you about the highs and lows of this particular journey. I assumed we would take our deposit and walk, hand in hand, into our local estate agents. Staff would immediately pop open a bottle of the good stuff  to celebrate our decision to become first-time buyers as we pored over a large property portfolio, which had all our dream houses exactly in our price range. The bank would rush through our mortgage and a week later, the Swarovski-encrusted keys would be ours.
How wrong could one person be? We fell for the first house we saw, came close to getting it only to be gazumphed at the last minute by someone else. We were distraught and our estate agents did not appear to be in possession of that perfect property portfolio I had assumed would be our next point of call if we lost this house. A few months went by and we were seriously starting to lose faith, veering between extreme paranoia that our estate agents were secretly sabotaging our search to deleriously discussing the pros and cons of life on a barge. Then, in one of those rare moments in life when you know someone must be looking out for you, Himself got the call that the first house we underbid for was on market again and was ours if we wanted it. It was magic and I will never forget the pure joy I felt at that moment, like it was definitely meant to be after all.
After what felt like an eternity filled with mortgage talks, estate agent screw-ups and NatWest online meltdowns,  we were sitting in our garden popping our own bottle of the good stuff and toasting to a healthy English-Irish alliance. Since then, we have settled right in. Aside from the need for a new boiler, new pipework and a complete rewiring of the house, we're good to go. Living together for the first time has proven ... interesting, and compromises have had to be made from both parties in order for said parties to reach their next birthday alive.
For example, Himself  likes to drill things. It's like having a small child in my care sometimes. One minute he's in front of me watching tv, I take my eyes off him for a second and he's drilling a hole in the sitting room wall. I am not altogether innocent either though. Last week I did a quick laundry wash and dumped the contents of the basket into the machine. One hour later, I was upstairs in the bathroom putting a face mask on when I heard a howl of rage.  Rushing downstairs thinking Himself had dropped his beloved drill on his foot, I discovered something much worse had occurred. Suffice to say, white work shirts do not stay white in a coloured wash.
But those little hiccups are just part and parcel of life at no 50. Last weekend it was my birthday. Our little house was filled with friends and laughter and as I looked over at Himself, admittedly through a blissfully tipsy haze, I felt the two of us had really made a home here. Himself, on the other hand, was eyeing up his drill again. Note to self, destroy drill.