Most stressful week evah!

God, it seems so long since I last checked in on everyone here.

I've had such a nightmare week. I didn't get to the gym at all, so that was not good.

I did, however, manage to stay on track for pretty much the whole week apart from dinner out on Saturday night and a few drinks. Which gave me a 1lb weight loss for this week - not huge, but 1lb a week and I'll be a stone lighter in time for the wedding I'm going to.

I made chocolate and courgette cupcakes for a colleague's birthday - they were delish! Really moist and tasty. I resisted and had just one without icing when I baked them, and one the next day. But the important thing is that I didn't eat more than that. Which I would have done.

On the job front, I have some pretty big news. They are restructuring my wider team, and as a result they are creating a new role of Shopper Insight Manager. They've asked me to fill the role. The optimistic side of me thinks this a fab opportunity to gain some new research skills and also gain some good exposure within the wider business because the projects will be more wide reaching and meaty. The doubting side of me wonders if they asked someone else first, if they've offered it to me because I'm not good with my current stakeholders. Stupid, huh? I just need to see the good in this and take the opportunity and do my best.

Another side of that is that I've been hauled into work 50% of my time on a big project with one of our customers - unfortunately that meant getting a brief on Thursday afternoon to be finished by Friday afternoon for a meeting on Monday, so no room for push back. On top of that, I was feeling so ill all day, and I ended up working til well past 6.

On the house front, well, that's probably been the most source of stress. We had a second viewing on our house, and felt really positive. On Friday they offered us £35k less than the asking price, which was taking the piss really. And on that basis, we would have only been able to put in a crappy offer on the house we want.

We went for a second viewing on Rose Cottage, and had to think about the practicalities - there isn't as much storage in the kitchen, which is smaller than ours, and fitting our furniture etc in the sitting room is going to take some creativity. However, we've decided that these are compromises we're willing to make.

We had a good chat with the vendors though and felt okay about things.

However, this morning, the buyers of our place put in a slightly increased offer, still £28k under our asking price, and £18k less than we needed to put in a strong offer.

We managed to talk them up an extra £3k, but it meant that we had to put an offer in on the cottage at £15k less than they were asking, which we hadn't wanted to do.

It comes down to this:

• Our offer is £385k. Our buyers are renting, so can move quickly.
• They've had another offer in at over £400k. The potential buyers are from America, so their disadvantage is that the vendors don't know how long it'll take for them to be able to complete. They don't have a house to sell though.
  
• The third couple haven't yet put in an offer. They've delayed a lot, and faffed around getting a survey done etc. so the vendors aren't that confident that they won't mess them around more. Again, they don't have a house to sell so can move even quicker than us potentially.

Basically, financially we're in a weaker position. Trust wise though, we're in a stronger position.

We won't know until tomorrow afternoon either way.

It's a horrible position to be in, but we've done everything we can do. If it doesn't happen, it wasn't meant to be, and something else will come up in the future.