New mortgage signed today

And it's for £500,999.  Yikes.  And the most scary part of it is that the mortgage was granted solely on my income.  We've decided to finally get things in place to redo our kitchen and back garden.  This would be far too expensive to do on our own at this stage so we've decided to take some equity out of the house with an offset mortgage.  Initially our mortgage payments will drop as we've extended the term by 5 years but as we gradually take the arranged limit out of the account our payments will increase till we finally owe the whole £501k.  All of this sounds pretty scary but at the end we will have a wonderful house to live in and will be worth it.

We initially saw an architect a couple of months ago and he suggested that the first thing to do would be to see an arboriculturalist (tree guy) as the ground works we want to do may require taking down a couple of our trees.  This was delayed as he has a month off in France every year and then had to quarantine for 2 weeks when he got back.  We finally saw him yesterday and he's writing up his findings as we speak.  Once that's done the architect can work his magic and get some ideas back out to us before we send them off to planning.

The current view is to knock the walls down in the kitchen and open this up into Flo's play room making one large open space.  We'd make the current conservatory a permanent brick structure and build it up to the current end of the utility room which would also be removed (much to April's disgruntlement).  Once that's done we'll have bifold doors the width of the house that would open up to a lovely retaining wall...  That's why we'll need to push that back and redo the entire garden.  

Sadly my shed pub will get sacrificed and replaced by something a lot smaller (maybe a trendy can bar) but this will help to minimise the loss of garden with all of the ground works.  

If all goes to plan, we'll be starting work in the Spring, but that is very optimistic as there's still loads to do.

To top that off we now have a second child, and soon to get a puppy (2 and a half weeks).  What could go wrong?

 

Less than 3 weeks to go

Only 3 weeks till our due date.  Yikes!  That's gone quickly.  We're now pretty much set for it.  We've even got the car seat installed which was kindly donated to us by our friends.  Thank you!  That's a few hundred quid that we don't have to fork out on just yet.

April's bought me a book to read

It's actually quite funny.  It's been ages since I last read a book.  Podcasts and tablet watching films and TV series has been the order of the day over the past few years.

April actually bought it for herself as the books she's been reading are aimed at women and finds they have sexist undertones...

Scaffolding

Scaffolding at the side of Lloyd's during the 3rd and final refit of lifts. This is the view from the 10th floor. They go Ali the way up to 12th. Yikes.

Brief scare

I've got new ear buds for my headphones and upon taking them off for the first time this morning one of them stayed put in my ear.

Yikes!

Luckily I was able to get it out. It was a close call with my fat broken fingers though.

Jeez, that's a bloody big dragonfly

Or at least I hope it is. If you listen closely you can hear Biscuit meowing.