Jumping ship (or not) and money money money.

This is the view from our living room window at the moment:

Which drives me crazy for two reasons:

1) For sale signs are hideous and attention grabbing, not a good combination and not conducive to relaxing when you are sitting near the window.

2) Neither of them are ours!

I am stunned every time I drive through our tiny estate and see how many of the properties are for sale. Serious, there are like 60 houses and there are at least 8 for sale or to let. And again, none of them are ours!

Now don't get me wrong here, I love my house. My house is, however, a two-bed starter home designed for a couple. We fit, but it's snug.

In some ways it is a brilliant house for kids: we have a nicely sized, simple garden; we have a good sized second bedroom for the kids; we are literally 30 seconds walk from a good park; and we have a parking space right beside our house; we have a bath and we have a downstairs loo for potty training.

In other ways it is a very inconvenient house for kids: there is no where in the house we can put a high chair where it isn't on carpet; the front door opens right onto the road (literally- not even onto the pavement and then the road- there is no pavement); the parking space is not wide enough to get a child out of each side! I have to get Amelia out and put her in the house, then park, then get Ben out. Not great when they are both very young; the kitchen is teeny and wherever I put Ben to help me cook he can reach the hob and pull the rings off lol; the schools nearby aren't great.

Anyway, I could go on, but I don't want to give a false impression of how lucky I am. We are very blessed to even own a house in this country, especially since I'm not working anymore. If I hadn't got a job straight out of uni we wouldn't even have been able to afford to buy a flat, let alone a brand new house in a cul-de-sac in Cheltenham Spa! And I do love this house.

It's just... oh... it would be so nice to have a kitchen/diner, to have a garage, to have our car parked somewhere where Ben could stand safely while I get Amelia out, to have an airing cupboard....

With the way things are in our economy and housing market it's going to be a few years before we can afford to move. We bought our house right at the peak of housing prices, so even though we have made a lot of extra payments on our mortgage we think we are still in negative equity. Sigh. I know that being on the housing ladder is good and it's all relative, but there is something so miserable about having to curb your expectations of how much you can spend on a house. We are also quite fortunate in that we bought the house on a shared ownership scheme, meaning that we only bought half of the house and rent the other half from the housing association. It's all worked out as 50% of the house rather than the specific figure of money that we paid, so really we have only lost half as much money on the house as we would have done if we'd bought the whole thing. When we come to sell, the housing association will get back 50% of the price, not the £65,000 that they paid (and likewise for us).

We've decided that we're not going to move until we can afford the house that we will stay in, raise the children to adulthood and grow old in. Ah, so romantic! We don't want to have to move again as we both feel it's such a waste of money. If we were to move now we'd probably have to move again when the kids are older and need their own space, so it does make perfect sense to wait.

So where am I going with this? I don't know really. It sometimes drives me crazy that we are trapped in a house that was never intended as a place we'd raise two children. I'd always, in the back of my mind, thought that we'd move when I was pregnant with our second child, before Ben went to school. It's ok. It puts us in a good position financially living here, and we have more than enough money even without me working at all. I think I just need to count my blessings more!

In a recent Relief Society meeting someone quoted, "Happiness is having £100 and spending £99; misery is having £100 and spending £101". I don't know who that was by, but I really liked it. I am so grateful that D is excellent with money and very wise in the way he deals with our finances. I am so lazy about this, but I know that I can trust him to keep us safe financially. We've fallen naturally into different roles: he is fab at dealing with the money that we HAVE to spend, and my strength lies in not spending any money that we DON'T have to spend!

But one day we will move, and it will be amazing! I'm sure we'll look back at this house with fondness. The place to which we welcomed our children, the four walls in which we learned to be parents and where Amelia was born. And I'm sure we'll smile about the steamy bathroom with no window and the cosy kitchen, just like we do about the tiny flat we lived in when we first got married, which was so small we couldn't even fit a wardrobe or a chest of drawers!