Taking The Plunge

It's a leap of faith, a career into the unknown, a giant jump off the edge of our comfort, our stability, our financial security.

We're going to renovate our home.

We've engaged a team of designers and have briefed and chatted, floated ideas and coerced concepts, bent rules, twisted thought processes and baulked at boring.  We're really going to do it!

When I ask myself what was the catalyst, it was finding the right team to help us.  It's early days, I know, but so far they've fit the bill perfectly and have a keen understanding of all our once-secret hopes and desires for the home we love and are listening carefully to the home we want to love into the future.  A friend once said "just make your home what you want it to be" - good advice, we're doing just that.

It's definitely time.  My eldest son can regularly be found camped on my bed, next to my bedside table , using my reading lamp as his younger brother is "playing music too loud" in their room.  He can't wait to have a room of his own, he says.

But whilst we are determined to keep it modest - not overstretch either our imaginations or our budget, already I can see that it's impossible to avoid both.  It's like a "simple wedding", a "small gathering for my 40th birthday", an "innocent visit" into Emilio Pucci - we just don't seem to do things half-heartedly once we decide to do them, finally.

And what's the point in cutting corners anyway?  We've lived here for 12 years without doing a thing to the house so let's go the whole hog, huh?  Let's stretch the budget, the imagination and the relationship!  Let's throw it all on the line.  Let's make the grass green on our side of the fence.

Oh, did I mention our backyard will be cut in half?!