Getting the keys

We were staying in Dave’s grandparents' holiday home in Wexford at the time as we were effectively homeless. Our lease had come to an end, my parents were living in Sligo, Dave's family home didn't have any empty beds, and we weren't due to move in with Declan, Dave's other grandfather for another week so we jumped at the chance of some time away in Wexford with wide open spaces and Wi-Fi!  

We drove up from Wexford on the 11th of November to finally get our keys and finish the 4 months buying process. I was dying in the car with a migraine and covered my head in a scarf the whole way there (but with some butterflies of excitement too!). The estate agent who had shown us the house in July was on paternity leave so we had arranged for another estate agent in the firm to hand over the keys.

When we arrived, we received a text from our replacement estate agent to say she was late for another viewing so left the keys under the flower pot. Dave reread the text aloud to me. I was shocked. No estate agent! No big event. No pomp. No circumstance. No bottle of bubbly. No card. No nothing. After months of pushing through the sale and getting every piece of personal information under the sun sorted, we sat in the car outside our new house feeling very underwhelmed.

This was probably one of the most anticlimactic getting the keys stories I’ve ever heard. I’m not the most materialistic person, but I did expect a little something to welcome us to our new home. Anyone else I know who has bought a house was left a card by the estate agent and previous owner, with a bottle of champagne. I know it would have only been a nice gesture… but as a first-time buyer, I expected a bit more of a special something when we got the keys.

So I decided we might as well make the most of it! We had spent the previous few weeks preparing to move out of the place we had been renting and as any renter in Ireland knows, landlords can be very picky about giving you back your deposit. We removed any marks that were on the walls (most had been on the walls the day we moved in but I wasn't risking it!). We scrubbed the place from top to bottom. We moved all the furniture back into the positions they had been on the day we moved in. We packed all our belongings into boxes... Boxes we have only emptied in the last few weeks! (It is January 2024 as I am writing this!)

In our rented property, we needed to ask permission to do anything. Remove the mould in the bathroom? Yes, our landlord wanted us to ask for permission. So in our first few minutes in OUR house, I stripped as much wallpaper as I could get off the wall without any tools. And it felt great! I hadn't really thought what I would do after I had taken it off the walls so it sat in a pile on the floor and we headed back to Wexford for our week of peace; one pocket slightly heavier than when we arrived, carrying the keys to our new home.