So we moved house. We'd been planning it a while really. Not actively planning so much as having discussed and accepted that eventually we would want a bigger house with more outside space, but we'd want to stay in our village. So for a couple of years we'd been keeping our eye on the market. Our village has quite a few larger houses with big gardens, but they don't also come up for sale, so we didn't want to miss the ideal one coming up.
And then it did. It was a Friday in Lockdown Number 1, and Rachel sent me a link to this house. I'd only scrolled through half of the photos when I told her to phone the estate agent. We hadn't been to visit a single other house at this point, although we'd been looking seriously since the stamp duty was reduced. This was the first house that Fit The Bill.
I mean look at it! How could we not fall in love with that? We went to visit soon after (before our house was even on the market) and discovered that it had extra rooms which were ideal, and was a triple-glazed eco-house! Even more perfect. We liked it.
The garden blew us away. Really big, wraparound and a veg garden, fruit cage and greenhouse that weren't even pictured on the estate agent's photos.
We wavered a bit, because after we looked round the house shrunk by at least 30% in our imaginations and we were worried about bedroom 3 being downstairs. We ummed. We ahhed. We poured over the photos and the measurements. And then we went for another look round and fell totally in love.
Selling our house was about as fun as selling a house always is. It felt like it took FOREVER to sell, and meanwhile Bramleys was getting multiple viewings, so anxiety levels were quite high. But it all worked out in the end.
On the second to last day of school term, we did it. We enjoyed the crazy scramble to box up the final things and clean on our way out of the home we'd lived in for 10 years. 
We took the children to school from Glenboig, then picked them up and walked them back to Bramleys, bubbling with excitement.
That moment is mad isn't it? The thrill of being IN the new house at last, but the fact that exhausted though you are from a week of packing and cleaning, you now have another week of cleaning and then weeks of unpacking ahead of you.
So then the unpacking and cleaning and sorting began, and it's still ongoing really. We are really enjoying how this space has improved our lives though. There are four ways to get from the ground floor to outside. FOUR! So whenever the mood strikes, you can pop open a door and you're straight out there.
The rabbits have their own zone, which is now professionally fenced off with a picket gate (Although our make-shift chicken wire fence worked pretty well for two months! Only two escapes!) We had to re-turf the area too, because although it looked ok in December (above), by February, after a very wet winter, constant foot-fall and rabbit munching and then two fellows digging around erecting a fence, it was bare mud with the occasional wisp of grass.
We used a mixture of low-growing clover-rich wildflower turf which I bought and grass lifted from the front garden (to create a wildflower meadow) to cover the abused soil. It looked like Frankenstein's lawn for a while, but it's knitting together nicely now. Leo and Rosie were really happy to have grass available again. Grazing time is back on!
Inside we haven't made many changes yet, to be honest. We have bought our first (probably of several) rugs. I'm super happy with this purchase. Not only has it transformed this floor from hard, slippery and constantly covered in fluff and dust...
...to cosy, textured, colourful and lush underfoot. It was also a really ethical purchase from House of Dhurries. Made in India, in the home of the weaver, rather than a factory, from waste fabrics, then transported to us, via Denmark. No new plastics, decent wages for all involved and it should last DECADES. Me likee. Me likee a lotee.
And it does a terrific job of anchoring down most of the dust so it doesn't constantly look filthy!! Obviously, we still need to make new curtains and put up a lick of paint, as well as remove some wallpaper not to our taste. But to be honest, the series of unfortunate events (mostly colours which did not do what they said on the tin) we experienced when we painted our bedroom, has put us off buying paint for a while. Plus, we can't find a fabric we love for the curtains that doesn't cost all our arms and legs.
The kitchen is in the centre of this home, which is really apt, because a kitchen IS the heart of the home, I think. Here we have endured many hours of lectures, home-learning and studying, as well as the usual baking adventures and meals together.
We invested in a new table with chairs and benches, so we can squeeze as many people as we can in the long sides, when we're able to have guests. And because our old kitchen table, which I love dearly, was really quite inconvenient as a kitchen table. Spills and crumbs always fell through the gaps and landed in the drawers and the chairs didn't fit properly underneath! It's been given a new job as my sewing table upstairs, and I think it'll be much better suited to that role.
It is rather a lovely space to hang out, because you can hear pretty much everything going on in the house, and holler to people upstairs. You can look out the huge doors and see what the rabbits are up to. Having them fenced in beside the kitchen and Rachel's office really is lovely, because we can always see them. We often couldn't at Glenboig, as they'd be tucked behind things, or hiding the the bushes where we couldn't spot them, but now, they feel like part of the family. There is also a huge silver birch just outside the kitchen doors, which is so relaxing to watch.
There are dozens of birds in the garden here. Blue tits, a family of robins, starlings nesting in the eaves next to our bed (so we can hear them rustling their wings at night when we're in bed too), pigeons (of course), blackbirds, dunnocks aplenty, the odd goldfinch, occasionally a magpie and a couple of times some lesser redpolls, visiting from up North to feast on silver birch seeds! They appeared in perfect time for the RSPB Garden Birdwatch, which was very considerate of them.
You can also see the hot tub from here, which the previous owners ended up leaving. We'd never particularly wanted a hot tub (expensive and not eco-friendly at ALL), but when gifted one, along with all the chemicals to keep it clean, it would be rude not to fire it up. We managed to get it running in time for Master R's 8th birthday in January, and had it on a few weeks. The kids LOVE it, and we enjoyed it a fair bit too. We do intend to get it serviced and have someone teach us how to use the settings and get the water levels correct. Hopefully by the summer, when we can have folks over.
Still inside, this is one of my favourite rooms. The Utility. Oh, how I've dreamt of having a little utility for laundry, for allotment-veg-washing and for hiding clutter I don't want in the kitchen. As it happens, this utility is HUGE, and there is plenty of space for all of those things. Those paint things had been in the sink waiting for me to have time to rinse them for THREE DAYS. It's not that I'm proud of my laziness, but it was brilliant to be able to leave it until a time I could do it, which I could never have done before, because the sink in the kitchen is in constant use. It's a lovely space to iron uniforms, fold laundry and gaze out the window at the fruit trees in the back garden.
We've been gradually adding our own flavour to this new home of ours. Mostly in the form of wall decorations. The stairway photo collage has become the kitchen cosy corner photo collage, minus a dozen which didn't fit.
The children's room is chaotic, colour wise, because their bedroom and playrooms were amalgamated into one, so there is red, pink and orange, plus the pale grey walls (and two teal). It also feels cluttered, despite being ENORMOUS, but once they've outgrown the toy kitchen, that will improve I think. What did help was erecting two massive shelves above the bunk beds, and helping Master R to complete most of his Lego sets so they can live IN ONE PIECE on the shelves, rather than in millions of pieces in boxes all over the place. 
The one room which is pretty much FINISHED is Rachel's office. It is a small room, which helped! Dark grey on two walls, which luckily goes with the pale grey blind which was left. We got her the cement/metallic pots with succulents for Christmas (and successfully moved house without killing them, while keeping them secret!) and she's got a desk which she can raise to work standing when she wants.
I created a mini-collage of photos and artwork on the wall, in keeping with the monochrome kind of scheme. I do like it.
The other big change that this home has enabled us to make, is to rescue the family piano from Norfolk and re-home it with us, where we can enjoy playing it. Having been raised in a home with a piano (and other instruments knocking about) I always felt a bit sad that Master R and Miss O didn't have that opportunity, but they are loving life with a piano now. Auntie K got Master R a piano book for his birthday and he's already onto the second book, while Miss O is working her way through. We get lots more practice down on weeks when I'm on annual leave, but the occasional tinkle still happens at the end of university days, or days when I'm not working on placement.
And the garden. Really I could do a blog post a day about this garden of ours. Not only is is spacious, but it's been well created. There are trees and hedges all the way around so you can barely see the fences. There are glorious fruit trees planted on the grassy area, so there are always branches, or blossom, or leaves to look at. And there are many things to play with. So much good wild fun is had in this garden of ours.
Tree decorating with a snowy cloud looming. I love that they do this kind of things just naturally, with no prompting.
We've been able to enjoy winter in this garden, as we got good snowfall again this year. So much snow, in fact, that the roads around here were perilous, so we spent a day sledging and studying inside, rather than me trying to travel to my placement community some distance off.
We've done more work in the garden, to be honest, than in the house. Doing the garden is so much more FUN. And quick. A shed, for example, can be popped up in one morning, even if nailing the roof down in a confined space causes much hilarity!
It is now mostly painted, although we ran out of this lovely green colour, so the back and one side are random mixtures of purple and green! We've bought more paint, but we haven't quite got round to finishing the painting, or putting on the eaves. It's a low-priority job. The key thing is, we have somewhere to store all our gardening bits and pieces. I've never had a shed of my own before, and I do love it.
I also love having a greenhouse! SOOOOOO much! Yes it's metal and plastic fabric so it's not the most beautiful, but it is FULL of life. This photo was taken just a couple of weeks into using it. I have rather cunningly slotted a piece of spare wood on top of the horizontal metal ridge and then hung my equipment on that. Currently, every shelf space and the entire side on the left are covered in plants. Courgettes, leeks, herbs, cosmos, sunflowers, sweet peas, sweetcorn... we've got it all going on in there.
Now some of the veg that started in the greenhouse are out in the raised beds. I can't tell you the thrill it gives me to pop out the utility door to water my veg of an evening, or to slip out in PJs on a Sunday morning to put the flowers out to harden off. SO much easier than trips to the allotment (which I'm still trying to keep up with, along with my buddy).
We're starting to get a taste of what it will be like in this space in warmer weather, and it's going to be GOOOOOD. No more sighing at the bleak, dead plants that the rabbits have destroyed. The children have enough space too, that they can entertain themselves for HOURS rather than minutes. They have trees to climb, and so many spaces to hide that hide-and-seek has become a regular occurance here. I mean, it always was, but they were always either behind the hutch or behind the hobbit hole before. Now they could be any one of a dozen or so hidden spaces!
We even bagged ourselves a hammock, once we knew we'd likely be moving here. Someone else in the village was selling it second hand so we snapped it up. I recently managed to find two trees I could attach it to, with some bailer twine, an old carrier chest strap and a buckle and strap from Master R's old bike helmet. Unsurpringly, the bike helmet buckle snapped, so I need to get myself another carrier strap to use next time. It was lovely and relaxing while it lasted.
Eventually, we'll probably re-configure the garden a bit. But for this year, we're going to live in it and see what works. Find out where fewer leaves are shed, so we can work out where to put our pond (which is currently still in existence, in a trug on the patio). Work out where the sun falls on summer evenings, so we can decide where our seating should be. For this year, we're letting it go a bit more wild. No mowing here, except for a couple of spirals, a picnic spot and the area around the washing line. Already some forget-me-nots have appeared in the lawn. I'm eager to see daisies and dandelions joining them.
The front garden has already had a makeover. There's a big expanse of lawn, with a beautiful old bramley apple tree and a tall ornamental pear. Too much plain grass in between though, so I've lifted the turf in two kidney bean shapes to create some wildflower meadows. My plan is, once they wildflowers spread a little, it can turn into a meadow throughout, with a few mown paths so we can get hither and thither without crushing flowers underfoot. 
Meanwhile in the back garden we have FLOWER BEDS with FLOWERS IN!! The kiddos have enjoyed choosing flowers to plant and it feels a genuine privilege to not have to build elaborate chicken wire cages to protect them from nibbling teeth!
Yes, life here at Bramleys is GOOD. We are so lucky. So very, very lucky. I was saying the other day, how we can see trees from every single window, and that makes such a difference. I'm a window gazer. I'm forever gazing out of windows, and being able to see so much greenery and life just beyond brings me peace and joy and hope for the future.