Hello. It’s me. I was wondering if after all these years, you’d like to, I don’t know like even care or remember me/anything at all about this house/blog/human? To be fair, I get that it has been, ahem a “while” since we last spoke. In fact I am reliably informed that it is now 2016. What a laugh. I for one, am finding that very hard to swallow for many reasons, the largest being that having arrived on this planet in 1976, it would appear that this year I am staring down the barrel of a locked and loaded big birthday gun with my bloody name on it. To be honest, I couldn’t give even the smidgiest slice of the littlest hoot: at some point over the last few years I have copped on that there is no growing up: whatever and whoever I was at about 28, is pretty much who I’m stuck with (give or take around 8 pounds because you know. wine) and just throw in a few new wrinkles each year (add in bonus ones if you’ve had a baby in that year because you know, sleep etc).

So no, I’m not expecting, at this point anyway, a mid life crisis. Thank god, as I’m way too tired to do a triathlon, retrain as a yoga instructor, have a lesbian fling etc.

I’m actually fairly happy with my lot. All I want a new house. Is that too much to ask? Not just any house though. Our new house. AND I WANT IT NOW! Christmas crap accumulation plus Au Pair occupation of spare room plus no-one bought me the Marie Kondo book for Christmas means that we are at maximum capacity, literally and mentally. Unless we finally, and for once and feckin all, build this bad boy, someone is going to have to leave. I’m happy to volunteer.

Happily it may not come to that. While I have been quiet (okay mute), I’m happy to report that while we have been slow, we have not been totally idle.

We are, I believe, on the brink of action.

We had lots and lots of fun sketching out our plans (Not so sure our architect would use this adjective) and our planning permission application went in back in September. Turns out all Daragh’s love bombing of our neighbour turned out to be a big fat fake waste of time with said person objecting the day before the application closed. And he never told us. #breathsinandplotsevildeedsforever. We are trying to be bigger people and not be totally raging but it turns out we are not so we are compromising and just avoiding him until we calm down (its been 4 months, still waiting).

Happily the planners don’t seem too worried about his quibbles, they were too busy with their own zillions of questions, which if I’m honest, went largely over my hassled highlighted head. Since then we have been back and forth and back again but before Christmas we closed it all out and so now, in 3 weeks time, we will know once and for all if we get permission or not. Exciting. Or not.

Both, if I’m honest, are terrifying. The latter, as we will have to get a very expensive new drawing board but the former seems equally bad as it means that we are finally game on. It’s been going on so sooo soooo long that the reality of ever actually having to build this house never mind living in it has seemed to get further and further away rather than closer. Over Christmas though, we brought some friends in who had never seen the house. And who hadn’t seen our plans. And looking through someone else’s eyes, I remembered: The downstairs loo. The panic-attack-inducing-with-shallow-excitement walk-in wardrobe. The pretentious glass inner courtyard. The island. Sweet Jesus the island. And the space. The promise of what more space will do for, yes our stuff, but also our heads and how we live or rather want to live has woken me up again to our dream and got my head, and heart, racing. Our architect built us a tiny cardboard model of the finished plan and it is, in my humble and totally up myself opinion, bloody amazing.

So there it is: a sneaky minature model peek of our future. Best guess we are still around a year off toasting our newly found bankruptcy at our dream island and that’s if planning all goes well so best case scenario 2016, and 40, is probably going to be a nightmare. 2017, and 41 however, is shaping up rather nicely.