Reaching
I’m quite stressed at the moment. I’m in a weird in-between state. I feel like I should normally be in a low right now, very tired, sleeping a lot, sleeping at night as well as in the day, mood not able to go higher than a certain point, etc. And for the most part, I am in that phase. Except. I keep waking up at night.
This is normally something reserved for my “high” phases where I have lots of racing thoughts, mood gets ridiculous, I have actual drive and do physical things etc. I can’t sleep much at night during this time, I just become wired. And I need to get up and pee SO MUCH.
Well, I’m tired and barely functional but I’m also not sleeping properly. It kind of sucks.
I’m also just really stressed about the future generally and about finally getting a house. We have more deposit to save and we feel so close and so far at the same time.
The original plan was to get a 4-bed so that Will’s family could keep living with us and not have to worry about housing the animals again. Will said a while ago though that he doesn’t actually want to do that, he wants it to be just me and him. I’m not sure he’s thought through all the downsides of that (e.g. having to do all the hoovering and washing up again, taking the bins out, all the things I can’t do but that he doesn’t want to do either, even if he is tired from work, even if he wants to play on his computer instead. Neither of us can even drive our own car and he’ll have to learn sharpish. Freya will be on her own again so we won’t be able to go out together anywhere).
We don’t have the income to buy a property outright so we’ll have to go the shared-ownership route. Shared-ownership homes have to be newbuilds. The good thing about newbuilds is the accessibility improvements (e.g. the level-access front doors that they are supposed to, but don’t always, have). And the house definitely shouldn’t be haunted, unless there’s a Mazzik on the land.
But the problem is, newbuilds are SO SMALL. We learned when renting a 2-bed in Southampton (that was not a newbuild, by the way) that in order to have enough room to move between furniture, never mind move a wheelchair around, that you need more rooms upstairs in order to get more downstairs room in the house underneath. That’s why when we moved to Andover, we got a 3-bed family house, because we needed the room downstairs.
A 4-bed newbuild would hopefully provide a decent amount of space downstairs, although probably not as much as an old-timey 4 bed. Newbuild 3-beds however, are not great, and 2-beds are so pokey they may as well not exist.
And, frustratingly, more and more of these homes are becoming 3-storey, so that they can be narrower (and therefore fit more houses on the same bit of land). I understand developers’ reasons for wanting to do this, but I rent one of those narrow houses now and it sucks, most of our stuff is in storage, the rooms are just too small. There aren’t even any openable windows in the living room, you have to open the back doors if you want fresh air, who the fuck thought of that.
Additionally, putting in 2 stairlifts to get to the top floor, even if we could do it on credit, would be so prohibitively expensive.
So (and I’m finally getting to the main part of the story), imagine my optimism when I was browsing development documents and I actually found a 3-bed house model that was
- Shared Ownership
- Had an en suite in the master bedroom
- Had a 4m wall in the master bed that would fit the wardrobes we want
- Had a 2nd bedroom that would serve fine as a game room, and a 3rd bed for a baby that wasn’t prohibitively small
- Had an actual hallway instead of going straight into a room (space for chair, shoes etc.)
- Had enough room in the kitchen for the dining table
- Actually had a little separate utility room
- AND had a garage
- And a surprisingly decent garden I could fit a chicken run in
- Most of all, was only 2-storeys so we’d only need one normal stairlift
So I kept an eye on this house and adjusted our deposit goal accordingly. I was hoping we’d be able to finally buy a house at the end of this year. I knew it was unlikely that the same house would be availble by then, but I hoped they’d release a similar one at the right time for us.
Well, we aren’t even through January and someone has ALREADY put an offer on that house. And while I know we most likely wouldn’t have got that exact one anyway, it just makes everything feel so much harder, that a thing that actually gave me some optimism is already gone.
You’d think that owning a house, painting the walls, and having your choice of pets, wasn’t such an extreme life ambition but it seems so unreachable sometimes. All we can do is keep saving money and hope God has something up his sleeve.
Not really much else to report aside from the fact that Freya managed to knock a tooth out! A bit of Dentastix fell on the floor and she dive-bombed for it, and all her force went flat onto the front of her mouth. She got blood on her chin but didn’t seem to notice that she’d done anything. The vet just put her on antibiotics and told us to wait for the gum swelling to go down. If it doesn’t, she might need dental work, but I’m not sure if it’s worth the risk of putting her under anaesthetic at her age.
I’m in a weird place so the closest thing to a spike of happiness I get at the moment is from playing Phasmophobia of all things. We tried the Beta version last weekend which has had a bunch of scary and frustrating updates (why ruin the thermometer thoooooooooo). Here’s a shitshow in a prison.
Although we did end up with 4 players at once, we weren’t quite brave enough to try Professional difficulty or the Asylum again.
I also did the initial Illbleed ending and am now speedrunning the main game again (the spooky house scenario so far) to get to the real ending. And I got attacked by that toilet that gets me EVERY TIME.
Freya’s new house collar. It will be easier to see it in the summer when she doesn’t have her winter coat!
Joop jooping about.
And as always there’s an earthworm heading down to the drainage layer because????