Our House

And all of it is now ours, as we received two letters this morning, one telling us that the mortgage has been repaid and the other stating that Barclays had removed their charge over the property.
I must confess, when we bought our first house, some 40 odd years ago, the concept of actually repaying a mortgage was just a vague notion of something that might happen in the future. But we’ve been in this house for nearly twenty years, and it certainly concentrates the mind when you get a letter reminding you that you need to repay your mortgage soon or face consequences!
It would have been nice if we only had to repay the amount we borrowed to buy that first house - £17,500! - but house moves and increasing property prices over the years soon put paid to that. Seems slightly weird that I paid more for my last car than I did for our first house!
Any hopes of receiving a set of Title Deeds, now we own the house, were quickly dashed by a single sentence advising us that since 2005 all HMLR records are now digital and we can just look online to prove we own the house free of mortgage. Not quite the same as a thick bundle of parchment documents all tied up with red tape, as I remember from days working in the Securities department of the bank.
Maybe I’ll print out the relevant page from the HMLR website and frame it, as a physical reminder that it’s now “our” house.