It’s been a long time coming. Our plan when we bought number eight was to live here for about 5 years and then move to a quiet village in Norfolk. We were hoping that would be our forever home, but we were also open to it being a stepping stone. Buy a fixer-upper, live there a few years, and make enough money to buy a sprawling Georgian country house, or a Victorian rectory. OK, so maybe not quite that, but a good-sized, detached house with a big garden.

18 months behind schedule and we’re moving into a tiny semi-detached cottage, set in a private lane on the outskirts of a lovely village. The village has enough going on that we won’t feel cut off. I didn’t want somewhere with no shop or pub, where you depend on a car for everything. This one has a bakery, butchers, co-op, pharmacy, hairdressers, a lovely pub and more. The cottage is too small right now but we’ll extend and renovate it over the next 12 months to make it right for us. Because of the location, both the private lane and the lovely village, we think this might still be our forever home despite it being a semi. And the plot is big enough that once we’ve built the extension there’ll still be space for a really nice garden.

So, we’ll be sharing our adventures yet again. In number eight version 2.0.