About a fortnight ago – and after a very long deliberation – Sue and I finally decided that having lived in our current house for over thirty-eight years, the time has come for us to move.

We love our house, but three floors, a steep staircase from the middle to the top floor, a garden with a 1-in-10 slope, our growing age and – in my case – reduced mobility all mean that we no longer feel that it meets our needs.

We have looked at various alternatives that would allow us to stay where we are (e.g. stair lifts, having the garden terraced etc.) but they are all very expensive options, and in the end we decided that rather than spend money converting our existing house we would be better buying another one that is more suitable.

We would love to move into a sizeable bungalow near to where we currently live so that I can continue to receive treatment from the various hospitals I am currently under, but they are just about as rare as hen’s teeth. As a result, we are looking for a house with two floors and a straight staircase to which a stairlift can be fitted. (Our current stairs each have two turns in them, and it would cost something in excess of £25,000 to have stairlifts installed whereas a stairlift for a simple straight staircase would cost about a quarter of that price.)

In order to sell our house, we need to declutter it. The problem is that both of us are collectors, and our collections take up rather a lot of room. Therefore, we have rented a storage unit in one of the big secure facilities that have sprung up over recent years and are currently moving stuff on an almost daily basis from our house to the storage unit. This is not an easy process (moving my stuff down from the top floor where my toy/wargame room is located is difficult as I have to use the steep staircase from the middle to the top floor) but we are just about managing.

The upshot of this is that work on my model railway layout has slowed down considerably … but it is continuing, as is work on various small wargaming projects. Likewise, the time I can devote to blogging is also restricted, so I suspect that rather than writing a blog post on most days, my output is probably going to be two or three times a week.