Tag: waffle

The good – we got the keys to our new flat.

The bad – leaking pipes in our new flat.

The ugly – the latest pictures from our new flat! (The “before” pictures are available from here.

As you can see, we’re doing a pretty good job of ripping things out and pulling the whole place to pieces. It remains to be seen whether or not we’re as good at putting it back together again. We’ve actually made more progess since these pictures were taken. The stripey wallpaper in the lounge is completely gone and one of the bedroom ceilings has had a coat of paint.

Our new boiler. Easily one of the best bits of the new flat so far since we now have working central heating and hot water.

We’ve found a couple of really cool things in the new flat (as well as enough DNA in terms of hair and nail clippings for an entire series of CSI and enough mould for an entire series of House). The first is this shoemaker’s last which was hiding in a cupboard in the bathroom. It’s going to look great polished up and used as a door-stop.

We also found genuine hardwood parquet flooring under the carpets in the hall and the lounge! Since it’s been protected by the carpet it seems to be in pretty good condition. We’ll need to fill the holes where someone has tacked carpet grip-rods and stapled underlay to it but once it’s sanded and polished up again it will look fantastic (and save us some money on new carpet).

The other fun part has been the new toys, sorry, tools that we’ve had to buy to get everything done. Far and away, Steven’s favourite is the crowbar pictured below. This has also easily been the best value tool that we’ve bought. Whoever built the fitted wardrobes and cupboards in this flat obviously meant them to last and pulling them down turned out not to be as easy as we thought it would be since they were screwed to the walls, floor, skirting boards and everything else within reach.

My favourite tool has been my ostrich feather duster, pictured in its glorious purple and black below along with a selection of the other tools of our trade. It’s just amazing at lifting all sorts of dust and especially good at cleaning sawdust out of circular saws!

Overall, we’ve made a really good start on the renovation and hopefully we can keep it up for the next month so that we can move as planned!

So after 4 and a half days of cursing the estate agent’s name, they finally phoned to say that the vendor had accepted our offer.

Steven’s in a state of advanced panic and I’m resisting the urge to phone the estate agent back to check that I didn’t imagine the whole conversation.

I had planned on a long, well-thought out post today discussing my success with NaBloPoMo and what’s it taught me about blogging and my particular approach to blogging. I’m afraid that, given the news, it’s amazing that I’ve managed to post actual words at all and not just complete gibberish.

There will undoubtedly be more to follow on this subject but right now I need to go tend to my shattered nerves.

Having complained earlier about the fact that Scotland really wasn’t all that different from England, I am now suffering through one of the major differences: the legal systems. In particular, how they apply to buying houses.

In Scotland, any offer you make to purchase a property is legally binding (except for when it isn’t; sellers, you might want to check with your lawyer that any offers you get are as binding as you think they are). In England, you can change your mind and withdraw your offer, without penalty, right up till the contracts are exchanged and money changes hands, which can be as late as the day that you’re due to move.

There are advantages and disadvantages to both systems. In Scotland, for instance, we wouldn’t have been able to make an offer on the flat that we’re currently interested in early enough because we didn’t have a mortgage arranged first. Had we made an offer without at least an agreement in principle, we’d have been taking the risk that our offer was accepted and then no one would lend us the money (which was very nearly the case). In England however, there’s nothing to discourage anyone from making an offer without fully considering whether they’re going to be able to follow through on it. This leaves the seller in the position of having to decide which of the offering buyers are most likely to be able to meet their offer as well as having to decide amongst the offers on their own merits. My current concern is that someone else’s offer will be accepted over ours and they will then pull out, the property will end up back on the market and we’ll have to go back through all this stress again if we’re still interested in buying the flat. (We know that there have been at least two other offers submitted.)

And (in England) the saga doesn’t end when your offer is accepted since the seller could also change their mind and pull out at any point up to the moving date. This is why there’s such a problem in the market with ‘chains’ (which I’m not going to get into discussing here). At least in our current situation, the seller is a bank who took the flat as a part exchange for another property so there’s no chain on either side and they hopefully won’t just randomly decide not to proceed with the sale.

Almost finally, a word of advice to estate agents: unless you’re absolutely certain that you’re going to have a decision from the seller on the submitted offers by close of business, don’t tell the prospective buyers that you’ll let them know by the end of the day! And if you still don’t have a decision from the seller two days later, it would be nice to call the prospective buyers and let them know that that’s the case!

Finally, for those of you who are worried that this blog is going to turn into a house-buying/renovating saga of woe, don’t panic! I don’t want that to happen either and will be doing my very best to find something (anything!) else to post about.

Ah, the property ladder! I was on it once, you know. Had a lovely view from that first rung. Affordable monthly payments (even though I hadn’t been able to put down much of a deposit), falling interest rates and regular trips to B&Q. Good times.

Then I decided to step off it, move to London and change careers. The step off was easy, my estate agent was swamped with offers and the flat was sold for almost twice what I had paid for it. Deciding to get back on two years later is not proving so straightforward.

In theory, it should have been easier this time. We now have two salaries which combined are roughly three times what my single salary was first time around and thanks to the proceeds of the sale of my last flat have a reasonable deposit. Unfortunately, we’re fussy about where we live and the current object of our desires is (according to the market) worth around five times what I paid for my first flat. And it needs a lot of work done. And we’re getting married next year.

Taken altogether, this means that we need to hang on to most of our deposit for renovation work and to pay for the wedding, which means that we have a higher loan-to-value ratio (meaning lenders want to charge higher interest rates). Adding in the fact that two months ago I took a large pay-cut when I changed careers so we need to borrow a larger multiple of our combined salaries (higher interest rates again) things aren’t looking so appealing in terms of available mortgages.

We are carrying on regardless though. An offer has been submitted to the estate agent (which probably merits a post of its own), a lender has agreed in principle to lend us a ridiculous sum of money and now we’re just waiting for the axe to fall.