Staying Right Here

I was reading a friend’s blog this morning about the trials, twists and turns of buying a home. They’ve finally signed up to buy a home and now just have the waiting ahead of them before they get to move in.

This particular blogger friend is in the US but I know that here in Perth the statistics suggest that we tend to move house more often than most.

Personally I’m more than happy where we are. We’ve been in our current house for a couple of years and we lived in the one before that for sixteen years. That’s a lot longer than many people stay in one place. I can’t see us getting the moving bug for many years.

How about you? How many houses have you lived in over the last twenty or so years? Do you get itchy feet if you live in the same place for any length of time? When do you think your next move will be?

With all the hassle of selling, buying, packing and moving I’m more than happy to be pleased for friends that are shifting house, but I’m so relieved that it’s not me.



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Putting life on hold

House_for_Sale_sign.jpgI love flying.

Give me the opportunity to get on an aircraft and I’ll be there but I remember many years ago sitting on a plane as it circled Melbourne airport. I think I was on a flight from Tasmania or perhaps Canberra. There had been delays earlier in the evening and so there were lots of aircraft waiting for their time to land. If I remember correctly we flew in wide circles for around 45 minutes.

As I said, I love flying, but this was just frustrating. I wanted to land so I could catch my connecting flight and then head back home to Perth.

More recently I flew home from Brisbane after travelling to the Gold Coast for a conference. We touched down at Perth airport and then had to sit in the plane on the tarmac for some time until we could taxi around to a gateway to disembark. All the gates were in use and there were a couple of other planes ahead of us waiting. Once again I felt incredibly frustrated. I was home in Perth but if I couldn’t get out of the plane I may as well have been a thousand miles away. It was as if life was on hold and there was nothing I could do about it.

Life is on hold again.

As I’ve mentioned before we’re selling our home and moving to a different area of Perth. The housing market is slow and so we’re still waiting for the right buyer to fall in love with our home in the same way as we did over 15 years ago. This home has served us well but it’s now time to move on.

In preparation for the move we enrolled Emily and James in a school in the area where we are relocating. That means that Pauline is driving them a long way each morning to school, returning home, then doing the same long drive each afternoon. On the weekend we’re going to church in the new area so it’s another long drive. It seems as if life is on hold. We’re neither in one place or the other.

Yesterday we put an offer on a home we’d like to buy in the new area but as our current home is still for sale we had to make the offer subject to the sale of our home. We don’t know if the owners of the other home will accept our offer but even if they do, we could still lose the home if someone else can make an unconditional offer.

It’s all so unsettling and it feels as if we’re just circling looking for a place to land or sitting on that tarmac hoping to find a way to get off the tarmac. The flight has been great but it’s time for it to be over so that we can move on. We truly believe that everything will happen in God’s timing but we ache for the time that it’s all over and we can go about the job of settling into our new home, wherever that may be, and get on with our lives. We’re tired of being on hold but we look forward expectantly for what’s in store. We don’t know how much longer things will be like this and we shudder when we hear of homes that take many months to sell.

If you’re a regular reader of this blog you’ll know that this is an added stress on top of what has already begun as a stressful year.

Our family would very much appreciate your prayers for our home to sell and for us to find the right home to take us through the next stages of our lives.



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