Our Tropical House

We are in the long and annoying process of buying a house... Not helped by Move Residential's least helpful mortgage advisor ever...

January 2016
Me "so I'm a bit worried about the time pressure with the new tax laws coming in in April, we need to get a move on with buying the house." (There are new stricter tax laws for landlords and as we have not been able to sell our current house this makes us landlords.)

Morgage man: "Don't worry about that you are buying a property to live in so those laws won't apply to you, so there is no time pressure"

We decide to re-mortgage our current house first which takes a while.

March 2016
Solicitors: so you'll be eligible for the new Landlord stamp duty, it's an extra 5k.

Me: what?!

mortgage man: yeah you'll have to pay it.

Me: you said it didn't apply to us?

Mortgage man: I don't remember that, of course you'll have to pay.

My parents bail us out -if we sell our current house within 3 years we can claim the money back. The fact that they can give us money is the one good thing about the generation who got on the property ladder aged 21 on minimum wage.  I feel like we're on a property snake. Anyway thanks Mum and Dad.

One day we will get our house and make it into a tropical paradise.  We've been toying with the idea of moving abroad for years and we've gone round in circles a lot. In the winter of 2011/ 2012 we nearly moved to Tunisia on a whim because we were cold. Then we fairly seriously though about moving to Lebanon in 2013. Then after 2 months of cycling from Liverpool to Kuwait we missed our friends and decided to stay here more long term. But then Dan quite recently saw a job in the Cook Islands and we weighed up the pros and cons of that and then my sister and her husband, who are currently in the jungles of Papua New Guinea, are trying to persuade us that New Zealand is the place to be.  Anyway this was all a tangent, what I am trying to say is that we are moving to an area of Liverpool called Speke. People ask us "why have you chosen to move to Speke?" This handy diagram explains:

If your budget is about £150,000 feel free to use our diagram.


Speke is not a tropical paradise, but to compensate we are going to have a tropical themed living area.

I've been making some things:

 Tropical cushions.

What everyone needs: a tropical ping pong bat.... it's going to be a clock, this is the 12, can you see it?

This is half a coconut shell sprayed gold with added glitter. Imagine 20 of these with a fairy light in each one wrapped around something to make a free standing lamp. If anyone wants the insides of the coconuts let me know. I'm making coconut ice cream and stuff but theres only so much coconut one family can eat. I had to borrow a vice off my Dad for coconut chopping coz Dan refuses to hold things I'm sawing. He is so unreasonable!

And imagine some cool wall paper like this.

When we finally get in we'll have a house warming party, there will be lots of coconut ice cream.