Recently our time for fun family days out has been a bit limited. You could say we’ve been on a big adventure that required a lot of consideration (quite literally). Some of you will know but for those who don’t I’m glad to say this story has a happy ending. We HAD to move house!

I loved our house. It was big, it was central and it had so much character. But it was on the first floor. Big Sister counted the 20 or so steps so many times.

I cried when Dad said shortly after Quinns’ diagnosis in 2016 that we were going to need to move. I hadn’t thought of it but he was right. There was no way I could keep carrying Quinns up the stairs as he got bigger.

At first I told myself that the house itself was fine. It was big and had all the space we needed. We adapted it to bring Quinns’ bedroom to the lower floor. I liked that he and Big Sister were next to each other.

We looked into a stair lift and believe it or not it is possible to get external stair lifts, even ones that turn corners. At a huge cost of course!

Apart from the stairs there were other issues; the bath on the second floor, the noisy wheels for our downstairs neighbours, the high ceilings that make it too difficult to fit hoists, the lack of easy access private garden…

You may think it’s only a house but it’s not just about the house. It’s where the house is. It’s the local community, my friends, my support network, Big Sister’s school, the easy commute to work for Dad that lets him be available at the drop of a hat. We didn’t want to change any of these things but knew that finding what we wanted in the place we wanted wouldn’t be easy.

So the challenge began to find a suitable, affordable house that met the needs of Big Sister, Dad, me and of course, Quinns!