You bought convertible term at 31 because the budget wasn't ready for the permanent policy, and now it is. The conversion is a phone call and a form, no exam, no health questions. But three things about it surprise people, and each one is easier to handle before the form than after. The reason to have started with the term in the first place is in start with convertible term.
The first is the price. The new permanent policy is priced at your attained age, the age you are on the day you convert, not the age you were when you bought the term. What carries over is the health class. If you qualified as preferred at 31 and you've since picked up a diagnosis, you still convert as preferred. That's the entire value of the privilege.
The second is the deadline. Conversion privileges expire, sometimes at the end of a set number of years, sometimes at an age like 65 or 70, and on a lot of contracts well before the term itself ends. A 20-year term with a 10-year conversion window isn't unusual. Find the date on your contract's schedule page, and if you can't find it, ask the carrier in writing. Miss it and the permanent policy goes back to full underwriting.
The third is what you can convert into. The privilege lets you convert to a permanent product the carrier offers for conversions on the day you do it. That may or may not include the product you'd design a cash value policy around, and some carriers keep a limited conversion menu. Ask for the list now, before the deadline pressure. If the menu is weak, it can still make sense to convert into what's offered and build the cash value design separately with fresh underwriting, if your health allows it.
You don't have to convert all of it. Partial conversions are standard: convert $250,000 of a $750,000 term policy into permanent, keep the rest as term, and the term premium drops accordingly. That's usually the right shape when the goal is cash value, since the permanent policy gets sized to the premium (that sizing is in how much to fund a policy) and the term keeps covering the family. Some carriers also offer a conversion credit, a partial refund of recent term premium applied to the first permanent premium, if you convert within the first few years. Ask. It's rarely offered unprompted.
Pull the term contract and find three things: the conversion deadline, the products available, and whether a partial conversion is allowed. Then set the converted amount from the premium you can fund every year, and start the paperwork while the deadline is months away instead of weeks.