And so it begins

Hello friend,

I'm beginning with a wee intro to who I am and what this is! Who is ‘me’?

Me is Hannah, a 40-something year old woman, who is part of a we, Erik, my husband and Kiki, our dog.

After looking for a house with some land in the North of England for well over a year, in February 2022, we made the decision to move to the Scottish Highlands or Islands.

Why so remote?

Like many things, it ultimately comes down to cost. We had 2 options, continue to look in the Northumberland & Cumbria are, mortgage ourselves for another 20 years and doubtless end up working hard, tiring full-time work for at least that amount of time.

The dream was always to become more sustainable, not only in the way we treat our planet, but also in the way we treat ourselves. What is the point in hitting retirement exhausted, having not fulfilled your dreams?

We want freedom, flexibility, some livestock and a kitchen garden, it would be a struggle to fit that in around two full-time jobs.

The Scottish Highlands & Islands gave us an alternative, we could buy something outright with the equity from the sale of our house in York. Erik could take a career break & renovate the house, and I could continue to work in my business Balance VA Services, which I love, to cover our bills.

Decision made.

After a couple of false starts, we finally had an offer accepted on a two bed bungalow on the Isle of Hoy, part of The Orkneys, with outhouses a plenty & a healthy 2/3 acre of what looks like pretty solid land.

The thing is, we haven’t viewed it. We saw it online, it fitted and we went for it.

In fact I am tipping tapping on my laptop right now in the passenger seat of our hire van on our way to the Island to see our house for the first time tomorrow when we get the keys.

Currently I feel like we’re off on our holidays or something, that will become incredibly more real when we realise what we’ve plunged all our savings into tomorrow!!

The whole process has been relatively straight forward, no chain, no mortgage and our solicitor signed ‘The Missives’ on our behalf. Plus, we can speak to our solicitor, David, whenever we want, within office hours, obvs. If I pick up the phone, I can ask to speak to him & generally he’s been available. He replies to my emails within 24 hours, it’s a totally different experience to conveyancing in England which is, lets be honest, a MASSIVE ball ache.

We were asked when we would like ‘Date of Entry’ to be, we think this translates as completion, we gave a vague, August would be good & within 2 days we were told that the vendors had agreed to 19th August. So for last month we’ve pretty much done nothing but wait for today.

Until Monday.

We were asked to transfer the cash for the purchase & our solicitors fees. At about 6.30pm after spending an hour sorting our exceptionally expensive house insurance, I logged onto my online banking only to realise that the maximum transaction is £25k a day.

The house costs a little (read a lot) more than £25k and even if we moved money across our accounts, it wasn’t going to happen, plus I think it would make us look a tad shady.

The only thing for it was to make the 2+ hour round trip to Ripon & go into branch to do it. Only, we had almost zero fuel in our car & the village petrol station had run out of petrol. There is another garage up the road but they had a power cut on Saturday. By then everything felt a bit fucking stressful, but we realised it was tomorrows problem, so we managed our emotions the only way we knew how, a gin cocktail & spaghetti carbonara!

We made a plan – in the morning I would take Kiki dog for a walk & go to my 8.30am meeting & Erik would sort the fuel. Then I would ‘dash’ to Ripon & camp if needed to get that money sent.

And it happened, thankfully without the camping. In fact, the service was brilliant and it was all sorted in 20 minutes. PHEW.

I celebrated with a dirty pastry from Greggs & Coke zero, to offset the pastry naturally & had a mooch around the ‘city’.

Ha!

The fact the Ripon is a City is hilarious, it’s tiny but it does have a cathedral & a Booths, so if nothing else, it’s P-O-S-H, Posh. If you don’t know about the wonder that is a Booths supermarket, think M&S or Waitrose x 20 – if you are in the North/North West do pay a visit. They also make proper fancy & funny shopping bags.

Thankfully, later that day, we got an email form the accounts person to say the money had been received.

Whoop – de – bloody – do.

Thank Fuck!

That left me with a shit load of client work to catch up on & we hadn’t even started the packing. But that didn’t matter, what matters was the transaction went through, we’d supplied the funds for the purchase of our new house, our new adventure, the next chapter of our life together.

It was a momentous day.