Moving

We’ve lived in this apartment for nearly nine years, and suddenly over Christmas, we made the decision to move.

Quite independently of each other, we realised the time had come to move somewhere else and within days, we’d listed the apartment. Within a week of being listed, we’d received multiple offers, a week later we finally accepted one.

We’re actually moving and it’s only now starting to sink in.

The reasons for our move are many and varied. There’s no one major thing going on for us, or the apartment building. But if I had to nail it down, I’d say that two years of on-again off-again lockdown have taken the sheen off our home.

We realised pretty quickly that we’d outgrown this apartment and wanted something else from a home. Being stuck in one place quickly helps you figure out what you love and what you loathe. We love the neighbourhood, so we won’t be leaving Canary Wharf.

We’d also come to dislike some of the many small disadvantages of this apartment and this building. None alone was a deal breaker, but the accumulation of annoyances snowballed into something that shifted our views on living here. With hindsight, they all sound potentially quite daft. But from a quality of life perspective, they’re the small pebbles in our shoes that make it difficult to walk.

The English legal system being what it is, we can’t definitively say that we’ve bought a new apartment. Our offer has been accepted and the solicitors are on the case. With a ten week estimate to get everything sorted, my patience is being tested. Especially when something crops up that has the potential to extend that ten weeks even further.

We’ve sold our place to first time buyers and our future apartment is lying empty. The is wonderful from a “chain” perspective, but only serves to ramp up my impatience. We had originally aimed to be moving in on March 31st – let’s see how that pans out.

In the meantime, our focus is on selling the few pieces of furniture that our buyers didn’t opt for, decluttering the many pointless objects we seem to have accumulated in nine years and finding some essentials (bed, sofa etc) for the new place.

Onwards and upwards!