Has the time come to move home?

Mrs Adams and I have got the seven-year itch. We’re beginning to think it may be time to move home.

The house we’re in has served us well and it was great when we moved here. Our family situation has changed and it doesn’t quite work so well for us anymore.

When we moved here we had one three-year-old child. We now have an eight-year-old schoolgirl and a four-year-old who will start school this year.

They presently share a bedroom but that won’t be feasible forever. Helen, our eldest, has taken up the piano and the one and only place for her keyboard is the kitchen so we are forced to dance round it every time we do any kind of cooking as it’s always there, in its stand available for when she does piano practice.

The property is also looking very tired in places. Sure, our kitchen is great. We had some major building work done last year to open it out and create an open plan kitchen-diner that’s suited us well. The rest of the house, however, doesn’t look so good. It looks and feels like it’s had two young children and a busy family charging round it for several years.

The living room carpet was once a light brown. It’s now several shades darker.

As for the stairwell, wow, that’s a sight to behold. For months now I’ve been looking at it thinking “we must get that repainted.” Little children have placed their hands on the wall as they made their way up and down the stairs, the banister seemingly being a foreign concept. The result has been numerous smeary hand prints leading up and down the stairs.

I didn’t appreciate how bad it was until the other day when I sat on the stairs to chat to Izzy, our four-year-old. Sat at her height I saw the issue was far worse that I realised.

We have done a lot to this house over the years. We’ve had a new roof put on, we’ve had the new kitchen installed, we reclaimed the garden that was desperately overgrown after years of neglect and we’ve replaced a wooden lean-to conservatory with a modern one that is much more substantial.

Nonetheless, I think we bit off more than we could chew when we bout this place. The truth is this house hadn’t had any substantial work done to it for years and years before we owned it.

We had romantic ideas of doing all sorts of things, including a major extension. We took a financial blow straight after we moved in when water started streaming in through the master bedroom ceiling during a particularly heavy storm. Funding that was earmarked for a new kitchen had to be spent on a new roof as it turned out the tiles were totally shot having long reached the end of their expected life.

Mrs Adams and I have come to appreciate we’re never quite going to reach the end of our “housing upgrade to do list.” There will always be something that doesn’t get done.

Our two kids are now through the very earliest years. I don’t want to get too carried away, but the years of spills at every meal time and wheeling a push chair in and out of the property are behind us.

In theory we could move to a new property and it wouldn’t suffer the same abuse.  Not, you understand, that we’d want to move very far.

Helen loves her school and we’ve already submitted the application for Izzy. We’d want to stay well within the catchment area.

All things considered, I think the time has come to move within the next year or two. We don’t need to rush, but the decision seems to have been quietly made. We’ve now just got to figure out the finances, whih will be a challenge in itself.

Admitting it’s time to move is quite a significant step. When we moved here I vowed I didn’t want to move again. It’s a long story, but Mrs Adams had moved house twice in 18 months before we moved here and I moved three times in the same period as we got married and set up home together.

I think it took us both, especially me, a long time to recover from so many moves in quick succession. Then again, times change as have the needs of our family. It’s time to get a house that meets all our needs.