Adventures of a Non-Binary Author – Just One More Box

The appointment with our mortgage adviser means an early start to our Saturday. There’s a certain routine I like to follow in the mornings on my days off. Writing. Exercising. Shower. Editing with a side of breakfast. Oh, and yesterday’s dishes. I have no fixed time scale for each task. On mornings when I have nothing else to do, it means I can take my time. Going at your own pace makes it all the more enjoyable. But mornings like this Saturday’s, when I have a fixed event to plan around, I have to be time conscious.

I rise before six, just for the wiggle room. After we’ve spoken to our mortgage advisor, the plan for the rest of the day is packing. As much as we can get done as possible. Which means I need to get my full routine done before we leave. I won’t get a lie in now until after we’ve moved. My ‘insomnia’ makes the idea exhausting. But needs must. We want to know if our affordability is what we believe it to be. We want to get a house. Freehold. No management company to create extra stress. Just a place of our own. Completely our own. We need the mortgage consultation today to go well.

Looking for somewhere to rent has given us a better idea of what we can afford. We didn’t really consider that last time. We’d been living together about six months at that point. And my independent mindset hadn’t fully adjusted to the idea of shared finances. So I was looking at the projected numbers and thinking only about what I could afford, plus a little. The reality of what we could afford felt like a foreign concept. Or rather, how to figure out what we could afford didn’t really occur to me. Who’d have thought I’d be grateful for anything in this mess we’d found ourselves in.

We like our mortgage broker. He’s friendly, upbeat, and the type of professional who feels like he’s on your side. We’ve kept him up-to-date with everything that’s been going on. We even saw him the week the purchase fell through. Technically it was the Saturday before it was officially confirmed. But the writing was on the wall. So he assured us once we were ready to start again he’d be ready for us.

Well we’re ready now. Now that we know where we’re going to be living. Now we can finally see the clear skies after the storm. We’re ready to start thinking about the future again. So we sit down with him. Tell him what we’ve figured out since doing this last year, that we can afford a higher mortgage. He goes through all the figures with us. It’s better than we could have hoped. The range we’ve already been looking in, we could theoretically go a little higher than that. We leave feeling elated.

But now we have to return to the packing. And everywhere we turn there’s one more thing to find a place for. Work cuts down the amount of time we have, and we’re quickly running out of it. How do more things keep appearing? We need more boxes. More bags. More time. It feels like an impossible task. How on earth can we get it all done…?

To be continued…