Buying a flat
That was a bigger gap than I expected to leave. So I left off we'd just had our offer accepted. Then came months of paperwork. To save myself the tedium of recounting it in detail, I'll just summarise.
The haemorrhage of money begins with us getting a surveyor in to look at the place. I’ll skip the details. Their biggest complaint - it's a nice old Victorian place which the previous owners have drained of every shred of character. We're not fussed since we have plenty of character to spare.
Negotiations to buy the freehold. We want the freehold, they don't want the freehold. No problem, you'd think. But somehow the solicitors make the process of selling us something the vendor doesn't want for a single pound into a several week waste of time affair. Time I could have spent having dinner on my terrace, damnit.
We got a clause in our lease in the old flat saying we can break the lease with 2 months notice. Our lease is up in August. We have a nice hard look at how long we expect it to take to sort out the paperwork and it appears we could be done as early as July. Great.
So, to make our lives easier, we decide an overlap is nice and give us a full month between moving in the new place and out of the old place. That would give us time to get work done and complete before we moved in completely. In theory at least. More on that later.
So we start looking for people to build us a real kitchen. The existing kitchen is tiny. Really tiny. You'd have trouble opening a laptop in there. The wall between it and the living room has got to go. We declare one of the bedrooms as the new living room and decide to make a big open plan kitchen/dining room. Which means tearing down a wall, adding a new wall and a bit of shuffling around lights and plumbing. Not something a mere mortal like myself can do.
Then there's the freecycle. In the past 7 years we'd acquired a whole load of crap. Put together a box to hold all the stuff we no longer want. Which promptly overflowed and required auxiliary boxes and even a suitcase. We end up with a pile of books, DVDs, electronics, clothes, kitchen stuff, and even more miscellaneous stuff I don’t want to think about. I try freecycling it a little bit a time so as to not flood the mailing list. Some things went really fast, like the anime (which was odd since I only got rid of the anime I didn't like). Some things went due to fortuitous timing (jez-alone's book swap could not have been better timed). Some things just kept around til the last minute when I just gave up and put it in a cardboard box on the pavement. Apparently nothing says "Please take my stuff" better than an impulse decision. In freecycle people have time to think "do I really need this?" On the pavement it's more "ooooh an internal CD drive, I'm sure I can use that for something."
So we set up day to exchange at the end of June. We sign things and hand over gobs of hard earned dosh. Then we just wait for completion. And wait. And wait. Finally, while watching the Henley Royal Regatta, the solicitor finally calls and says the vendor paperwork is all done and the place is ours. Fortunately, given the event, there was plenty of Champagne at hand, so we incorporated an additional celebration into the festive mix. Which was good since we'd been carrying around a bottle of Champagne with us for a fortnight waiting for that call. We just needed to wait til mid July to pick up the keys. Which turns out to be an adventure in of itself.
We're supposed to complete on 16 July. Some paperwork still needed to be sorted (I'm not sure what or how). I spend the day at work just waiting for the call to come get the keys. I eventually give up and go home. At like 530 (on a Friday afternoon) we finally get the call that everything is in order and we can pick up the keys from the estate agent. "…And, by the way, we close in half an hour." Panic. Frantic calls between me (on the bus home) and wifemonster (at home) ensue. We agree, I wait for the bus that goes from the old flat to the estate agent (a countdownless bus which comes at random intervals and takes 30 or so min to get there), she will get on her bike and book it. Whoever gets the first wins the prize of not having to wait til Monday morning to collect the keys.
The bus comes while the wifemonster is preparing the bike. She manages to pass me before Highbury Corner and gets to the office 5 minutes before closing. I get there 10 minutes later. Turns out, biking in London is faster than bussing. But we have the keys to our shiny new flat. That’s the important thing. So I meet her at the flat and we walk in together.
The haemorrhage of money begins with us getting a surveyor in to look at the place. I’ll skip the details. Their biggest complaint - it's a nice old Victorian place which the previous owners have drained of every shred of character. We're not fussed since we have plenty of character to spare.
Negotiations to buy the freehold. We want the freehold, they don't want the freehold. No problem, you'd think. But somehow the solicitors make the process of selling us something the vendor doesn't want for a single pound into a several week waste of time affair. Time I could have spent having dinner on my terrace, damnit.
We got a clause in our lease in the old flat saying we can break the lease with 2 months notice. Our lease is up in August. We have a nice hard look at how long we expect it to take to sort out the paperwork and it appears we could be done as early as July. Great.
So, to make our lives easier, we decide an overlap is nice and give us a full month between moving in the new place and out of the old place. That would give us time to get work done and complete before we moved in completely. In theory at least. More on that later.
So we start looking for people to build us a real kitchen. The existing kitchen is tiny. Really tiny. You'd have trouble opening a laptop in there. The wall between it and the living room has got to go. We declare one of the bedrooms as the new living room and decide to make a big open plan kitchen/dining room. Which means tearing down a wall, adding a new wall and a bit of shuffling around lights and plumbing. Not something a mere mortal like myself can do.
Then there's the freecycle. In the past 7 years we'd acquired a whole load of crap. Put together a box to hold all the stuff we no longer want. Which promptly overflowed and required auxiliary boxes and even a suitcase. We end up with a pile of books, DVDs, electronics, clothes, kitchen stuff, and even more miscellaneous stuff I don’t want to think about. I try freecycling it a little bit a time so as to not flood the mailing list. Some things went really fast, like the anime (which was odd since I only got rid of the anime I didn't like). Some things went due to fortuitous timing (jez-alone's book swap could not have been better timed). Some things just kept around til the last minute when I just gave up and put it in a cardboard box on the pavement. Apparently nothing says "Please take my stuff" better than an impulse decision. In freecycle people have time to think "do I really need this?" On the pavement it's more "ooooh an internal CD drive, I'm sure I can use that for something."
So we set up day to exchange at the end of June. We sign things and hand over gobs of hard earned dosh. Then we just wait for completion. And wait. And wait. Finally, while watching the Henley Royal Regatta, the solicitor finally calls and says the vendor paperwork is all done and the place is ours. Fortunately, given the event, there was plenty of Champagne at hand, so we incorporated an additional celebration into the festive mix. Which was good since we'd been carrying around a bottle of Champagne with us for a fortnight waiting for that call. We just needed to wait til mid July to pick up the keys. Which turns out to be an adventure in of itself.
We're supposed to complete on 16 July. Some paperwork still needed to be sorted (I'm not sure what or how). I spend the day at work just waiting for the call to come get the keys. I eventually give up and go home. At like 530 (on a Friday afternoon) we finally get the call that everything is in order and we can pick up the keys from the estate agent. "…And, by the way, we close in half an hour." Panic. Frantic calls between me (on the bus home) and wifemonster (at home) ensue. We agree, I wait for the bus that goes from the old flat to the estate agent (a countdownless bus which comes at random intervals and takes 30 or so min to get there), she will get on her bike and book it. Whoever gets the first wins the prize of not having to wait til Monday morning to collect the keys.
The bus comes while the wifemonster is preparing the bike. She manages to pass me before Highbury Corner and gets to the office 5 minutes before closing. I get there 10 minutes later. Turns out, biking in London is faster than bussing. But we have the keys to our shiny new flat. That’s the important thing. So I meet her at the flat and we walk in together.