It's been wonderful! My big plan was to post an entry on my one year anniversary of being away (December 17th) and go through everything that I have achieved.
Check:
Move to England with hubby
Move to England with hubby
Find jobs before March (both successful and found jobs in January)
Find a job in Sensory Science... for a market leader, at that
Join the Camping and Caravanning Club
Visit Camping and Caravanning Club sites
Complete a half marathon
Find a house
Buy a house
Bonus items for this year were:
Dad coming to visit
Trip to the south of France (although we were rained in half way through)
Camping in Dorset and doing the coastal walks and fossil finding
Cider Festival in Ross-on-Wye with the girlies
Faye and Dean Healy's wedding (triple bonus points for superb black and white coordination and for their portable photo booth... p.s. I am currently typing with one hand as my other hand is conveniently tied behind my back by the new Mrs. Healy)
Matt and Nicky Mills' wedding (fancy dress= bonus bonus points)
Seeing my friends every week
Picking up some sort of strange accent... for those of you that have spoken to me on the phone, I do apologise... I pick up the swing of the accent of the people I'm around easily. Many fellow Canadians have pointed this out to me and if I engage in enough conversation (about an hour or more) then I snap back into my regular accent of over accentuating my A's. Unfortunately I don't sound posh; it seems to be some mix of Brum-accent and Canadian which often ends up sounding soft Irish to other UK nationals.
Goals for 2011:
Finish up our house (hopefully by the spring)
Keep on camping
Work nearer to home
Complete two half marathons
Get home to Canada
Host Christmas invited (let me know if you are coming so I can prepare accordingly)
Complete blog entries on time ;)
Now, for our house...
After much searching (somewhere around 40 viewings), we found a house that we liked. First impression was that it was bigger than any of the previous houses that we viewed. It's on a good street (in a cul-de-sac), a 10 minute walk from the train station, with a big garden (possibly for chickens), has a field behind it (with no scope for development in the future), two big bedrooms and one small, a big sitting room that has a patio door that opens to our garden, dining room facing the front with bits of red glass in the windows, big enough kitchen, and two loos. This latter point is important to me. Many of the houses in England only have one, and when you have grown up your entire life with the option of two toilets, it is not very nice when there is only one.
We both decided that it was somewhere that we could see ourselves living for more than a few years and decided to put an offer in with the estate agent. After a bit of battling, our offer was accepted and everything went ahead. Things work very differently here; from the date that our offer was accepted, it took three months before we actually had the keys. We had pre-arranged our mortgage, so that wasn't the issue... it was all of the legal mumbo-jumbo that goes on to check that there aren't any issues with the property in regards to how it was built, who the previous owners were, etc. It all turned out okay in the end and we received the keys on the 20th of December. Merry Christmas to us!
Since the 20th we have been busy ripping things down every single day. each room needs redecorating as the previous owners had lived in that house for at least 60 years from what we can tell from the land titles, and probably only decorated it twice in that time. Have a look for yourself:
Your/ guest bedroom
Sitting room with the previous owner's furniture.
Our garden/ back yard with a patio and back decking (wine garden)
Our fireplace after Craig took it out= future home of our log burner
Kitchen with wood panelling. This now looks like a DIY disaster. All of the wooden panelling and tiles have been ripped out.
Our bedroom, post decorating.
Bathroom upstairs. This will be the very last thing that we tackle.
In the past 11 days we have taken all of the wallpaper off the walls (except for in YOUR guest bedroom) and our office. We have ripped out the fireplace to install a log burner and Craig and his mates have started ripping off the wood panelling in the kitchen which has exposed some dodgy-DIY building work. We know that we need a new boiler and to upgrade our central heating system (boiler heats the hot water in the pipes which flow to the radiators throughout the house). We have some electrical sockets that need to be looked at and our fuse board is ancient (fuse wires). We have since decorated our bedroom and should have the dining room decorated by the end of the weekend. Apart from those major jobs, we will keep on getting on with the decorating because it is the cheapest and easiest thing to do. All that said, our abode won't be taking guest room bookings now until March, but seriously, we welcome any of our friends (and friends of friends) to come and stay with us if you fancy a trip to the Isles (http://www.canadianaffair.com/).
I hope that you, too have had a wonderful year. Merry belated Christmas and Happy New Year!
