Well typing that title was a bit of a surprise to me, but that’s what I’m mulling over at the moment. And I don’t know about you but when there’s something to mull both my unconscious and conscious mind take part and not always in the balance I’d like. The consequence is that things start, but don’t always finish, some things end before they’ve started and generally I don’t get anywhere near as much done as I’d like to.
Back when I first shared on here that we were looking to move, one of the first questions people naturally asked was “will you change your blog name?”
Back then my answer was a definitive no, and while the whole business of moving house was taking place that was firmly my intention. Since we’ve moved people have asked again if I’ll change the name here, and I’m much less sure of my answer.
I’d thought that our house - 139a - was very much part of us and our lives together - it was our first house together, we celebrated our engagement there one snowy February day, and even held our wedding reception in the garden. It has hosted many friends and family gatherings, most recently for our combined 110th celebration (two fiftieth birthdays and ten years of marriage!) and it obviously has lots of memories, as houses do. And while we were ready to move, and had emotionally detached from the house I’ve been surprised by how little I think of our old house (even if at times I do still refer to it as back home!) and MOH feels the same too.
We’ve been in Nottinghamshire not quite two months, and we already feel very settled. We’re so glad we carried on with the faff to buy this house - that’s a story for another day - as it immediately felt right, and even more so the day we moved in. Buying it took a while to make it happen as we first viewed it in August 2022, with the most recent and final viewing in May 2023 - the short version is we lost it twice, but got there in the end.
But anyway I digress.
Because our new house feels so much like home, and has done from when we moved in, renaming my blog and moving away from 139a feels like a logical step. Which is a sentence I never thought I’d type, but I am and it feels right. Last February I celebrated ten years in this space, and things change, and that’s ok.
The tricky bit is to what, and that’s what I’ve been mulling.
Even writing this post has made me realise that a name change will happen - even though it brings a fair amount of work, and needs to be looked into in more detail, but it’ll happen because it feels the right thing to do. I’m pretty sure there’ll still be ‘life’ in there somewhere as my blog has always been about more than the house and garden, but what exactly, who knows?
I’ve a couple of ideas which I’ve started to check out on social media and google searches, and one looks more promising than the other. But it’s a tricky one, as I don’t want to leave it to long that inertia sets in, or even worse that in the interim someone nabs the name, or something similar (I think that’s probably unlikely, but…)
The other thing writing this post has done is to help me think things through and free up some space for new stuff to take - and hopefully that will be on the creative side, and help with what this space will become. It’s something I want to get right the first time, I don’t want to be changing it every week or so, but I’m happy that I have the startings of a plan. I do like a plan!
In the meantime though I’ll be carrying on in my current guise, but just know that a change is on the cards, but it’ll still be me with the variety of posts you’re used to.
Until then, enjoy a picture of the Red Arrows flying over our house, as they did on Wednesday afternoon!
