The secret life of surveyors reports...

Because I’m a little stressed...oh alright, very stressed with buying the house my partner went out this morning on a mysterious mission. She came back with a goodie bag for me! An enormous and very beautiful bunch of flowers, a comic (ahem, clearly that was a mistake because I don’t read comics...), a de-stress face pack and a card telling me I how much she loved me. It did the trick! It was very sweet, thoughtful and loving and I appreciated it a great deal.

I feel a bit pathetic for being stressed because generally I’m a stoic little sausage that just gets on with the job at hand, but the problem with buying a house is that you fall in love. You can’t help it. Intellectually you deal with the practicalities of buying a house – not least that it might fall through, and that it is, at the end of the day, only bricks and mortar. But your heart is having none of it. In our heads we have already moved in and if for some reason that couldn’t happen, we would be simply devastated. So that’s where the stress comes from; wanting something so badly and wanting it all by yesterday!

We’re reading the surveyor’s report today. Not to be recommended for light bedtime reading. But our surveyor (JP Baldwin) is excellent and as far as possible, the report is accessible and easy to read. I would imagine there are some surveyors that couldn’t give a monkeys that you yourself weren’t a structural engineer and therefore didn’t understand a bloody word of the report. But this firm seems to actually care about its clients. Shocking concept I know.

We’re also making a list of furniture/things we need: bed, mattress, washing machine, fridge freezer, dishwasher (!), chest of drawers, sofa bed and some fencing. I’m not sure whether you were interested enough to actually want to know what’s on our list, but there you go...

Bess – having been prevented from raiding the chicken food – is much better this morning and hopefully we’ve seen the back of the excessive wind problems. No pun intended. We all had a lovely walk this morning and now we’re all squashed onto the sofa: Pluto and Bess asleep and my partner and I working on paperwork.

Tonight we plan to go and see the Secret Life of Bees. I bought the book in San Francisco a couple of years ago and absolutely loved it, as did my partner when she read it after me, so we’re determined to see it at the cinema and are keeping everything crossed it’s just as good!