Also goodness gracious me except much more so this time, we're buying a house.

It's strange how things work out. Of the semi-detached houses in the Village that we'd looked at last week, we had a choice between a couple of our favourites, 72 Duff Street and 40 Duff Street (just between Not-Very-Good Street and Absolutely-Falling-To-Pieces Street). About an hour after we'd looked at it, we got a call saying that 72 had gone under offer, and not wanting to deal with a bidding war, we offered on 40 instead. 40 promptly went into a bidding war, then everyone on the 72 offer backed out, so we've now got into that one and have had our own offer accepted. We have photos of it from two showings up in Whitney's gallery.

Of the remaining houses in the Village, I think we've got the one that's most easy to change to our own needs - the main change needed here is that the kitchen needs a delicate touch of sledgehammering to take out an extra wall that the previous owners put up, and we've been told that it's very easy to put a second bathroom in the basement if we want to. It also seems to have one of the very few basements that doesn't fill with water - you can see me testing the floor in one of the pictures, and uniquely that day it was perfectly dry. We had another house that looked very promising a few streets away, and it was mostly very nice inside but the basement carpet was rather... squodgy.

So now we need to get another letter from the bank and organize an inspection, and the rest of the buying process stretches out in front of us - the formal mortgage application, purchase and sale, and closing at the end of May. Whitney is already The Simsing it up on any site but IKEA looking at furniture to put in it.