I think I’ve finally cracked it. I love love love our crazy house. I love its weird nooks and crannies, its period charm. I especially love my WIR and new ensuite bathroom. However, I reached the end of my rope recently when I returned home from an extended stay in my home state, where I had been sleeping in quiet bedrooms like a very happy baby. The traffic noise on our busy street just got to me.

DH and I are having trouble getting enough deep sleep, as our house, on a busy road, is made of wood and tin and has air cracks everywhere. Typical of a stilt home. We can’t get our bedroom quiet enough for a good sleep. So on the weekend I started looking in earnest at houses on quieter streets, with the requisite number of box rooms for our myriad children. I think I found one. It’s a mostly unrenovated Queenslander in very good condition, with a near-new (albeit dog ugly) kitchen, good sized back deck and three separate living spaces. Less backyard, but that’s not a drama. So this week is VERY OVERDUE TAX week. I have to do this to see how much I have earned, so that banks won’t look at me funny when I say, no, I’ve not done my tax in three years! (This is a distressing but typical thing that I do). Also, given that I have a company, I will be compiling SIX tax returns. Bad, bad me. But it must be done.

Because Harry’s Money Pit, beautiful and quirky that it is, is suddenly getting too noisy to manage. And a home needs to be a nest, a place of rest, and a sanctuary. With traffic roaring up and down the hill all day, this ol’ house is not the oasis of calm I need it to be.

If the banks (plural because we will schlepp, I can promise you) give us their blessing and their money, we will spruce up the exterior with a new paint job in that white and black thing I was talking about. We will replace all the window hoods with fresh new tin, and repair the back deck cover and put on a new UV rated perspex canopy, and fix one of the unrenovated side exterior walls. We will spruce up the interior with a fresh paint job on the ceilings and woodwork where needed, and insert a new wall in the Oh Jesus room.

In the garden we will get a proper gardener to come in and trim the two trees of overhang, and repair the turf at the rear, as well as clear the yard of detritus. We will pave both walkways down the sides of the house with cheap concrete pavers so the walkways are easy to access.

In the downstairs we will clear out most of the stuff and put it into a storage facility, or, if new house happens first, into the new house.

If we don’t move I’m tempted to do all this stuff anyway, blow the budget! It’s all needed.