One week to go!

So that the outside of our new home. Thats quite ok but look whats in the "sitting room"!

And one of the bedrooms.

So we've bought this frigging enormous water mill in Bainbridge, North Yorks and are moving up there next Tuesday. So why??

Well - ...having worked for at least 15 years running a small Vets in London along with some house buying and selling with my builder husband we were looking for a new life. Having come to London to do an MA I ended up staying for 24 years which is long enough for anyone. So we're on holiday and visiting Hawes in Yorkshire and as usual Neil (husband) starts looking through etsate agents windows and comes up with the usual I've found an amazing .. but this time its a Water Mill. So we look at the picture and yes it is amazing so it can't hurt to look at the details and its still amazing and needs a lot of work doing which is what we do so it won't hurt to view it so we make an appointment for that afternoon. So 3pm we view it, fall in love with it, offer on the Monday, accepted on the Tuesday. Visit again the next weekend to make sure we're sure and so it begins! Next Tuesday we will swap our life in a very civillised 4 bedroom Edwardian Terrace in Muswell Hill, London, for life in an industrial building by a river in a small village in Yorkshire. It's a very large, C17th, stone built, working, listed Water Mill. The wheel is in the authentically creepy basement. It is incredible, when the wheel turns the whole house sort of rumbles and bits of machinery move throughout the building. The grinding stones are on the ground floor, with all sorts of winding gear on the first and second floors. And thats the mill workings. But what of the living accomodation? Well thats not quite so exciting. The mill was converted in the 70's (from totally derelict) by Dr Cole who restored all the machinery to its current working condition. The building was used as part residential, part workshop and part (fairly strangely) doll's house museum. It has also been empty for about 2 years. The boiler (creepy basment of course) is about the size of a smart car with more lights than the flight deck of the star ship entreprise. It is duel fuel, oil and coal tho I'm not spending my life shovelling coal into some scary bloody behemoth in a spider filled room that looks like a toture chamber in Saw. Neil tried to turn in on the other day, it just gurgled a bit and he bottled it and turned it off and ran. Expect a buncefield plume from the north next Tues.

We have bathrooms (very 70's) and a kitchen (room with a sink on the ground floor) but all pretty rudimentary. The place will pretty much need to be totally refurbished, re plumbed, wired etc so living will be pretty hard to start with. Hard and cold if the sodding boiler won't start.

And the grand plan - we want to run a Guest House.

But first we have to pack up this house. We've been here nearly 11 years so have accumulated a lot of stuff, including 2 cats and a dog, all adopted from work over the years. No children, prob sensible as we don't want them falling in the Mill race, getting tangled up in machinery, lost in the cellar etc. So back to the boxes!

Bloody hell the things you find in kitchen cupboards, enough lentils to - not sure what really but obv more than we ever wanted. And the cats keep falling asleep in the boxes, if they don't get shut in a box and shoved in the removal van it'll be a miracle. The poor dog (Dennis) is freaked out by all the packing and a tough decision to know which toys to pack and which to throw and great nostalgia at finding the "first toy we ever bought him" in the cupboard under the stairs. Right MUST do some packing...