Posts Tagged ‘Moving House’
10 days to move out
Posted on: 19/09/2011
Well, things have become insanely busy round here! Admittedly it has rather more with trying to say goodbye to friends and keeping track of an increasingly intrepid toddler, than to do with any packing that should be being done… Indeed, the only reason I am sitting down to blog about it is because Loved One bought me a shiny new iPad for my birthday and I wanted to try out the WordPress app. Which is OK, but very basic. Nothing but plain text and NO pictures. Which might explain the rather boring appearance of this particular post..
Here are six things I am slowly starting to realise about moving:
One
Take all offers of childcare you can beg, bribe or blag – you need every second of child free time you can get.
Two
Try and keep doing things you enjoy if you can. Don’t let the packing demons force you into a hermit-like existence or you will become a person devoid of good humour and your children will hide from you.
Three
When you are doing things you enjoy, try and ensure it doesn’t involve more laundry or catering than normal. Swimming, for instance, will give you a double headache because you have to find somewhere to dry the kit afterward. And on no account do it three times in the last ten days.
Four
When trying to chase up school admission departments who seem to have no idea of the urgency of the situation, do so before 2pm and on a weekday, or the entire department will have gone home and left nothing but an irritating answer machine message telling you to call back at a more suitable time.
Five
If you have been running around like a headless chicken all day, do not expect to be able to pull out endless reserves of stamina to deal with yet more headless chicken impressions in the evening. You will get the kids in bed and you will no longer be any good to anyone.
Six
When contemplating the sheer enormity of what you need to achieve, do not let your urge to procrastinate inspire you to blog about your predicament rather than picking your socks up and actually getting on with it.
Yes,well…
I look forward to updating you when the dust settles. And if you catch me blogging between now and then, feel free to give me the severe reprimand I deserve.
Comparing removal quotes tonight, I suddenly realised that this house move is finding me nose deep in spreadsheets most of the time. Considering I generally don’t use the application, this is quite a dramatic change for me.
If it’s not comparing quotes from removal companies, it’s planning rooms, checking items off lists, and so on. Look…
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See what I mean? If nothing else, it’s made me realise I’ve not been sitting idle…
Will I still be this into spreadsheets after the move is over?
Hmm… Probably not.
We are now officially ‘Sale Agreed’!
Our buyer, who seems like a really nice and genuine person, has offered at a price we find acceptable, and his own buyer has already completed. Solicitor’s details have been exchanged, and it is the furthest we have managed to get in the almost six months that we have been on the market.
Of course, any number of things could go wrong. Someone could lose their job. Someone could pop their clogs (the buyer’s buyers are in their eighties). Someone could change their mind. Someone could have got their numbers mixed up.
But, for now, I’m just looking forward to seeing the sign outside our house change from ‘For Sale’ to ‘Sold’.
And finding a home of our own, of course. All the ones we adored have long gone, but no doubt there’ll be something out there for us, waiting to be our home.
Another week, and it’s all quiet on the offers front again. We are still getting regular viewings, but as usual, people are saying the bedrooms are too small. (I reckon everyone’s got used to huge bedrooms somewhere along the line and just can’t comprehend a room that fits a bed but not much else, but I’m veering off topic here.)
We put our house on the market around the end of February. We thought we’d get a sale in no time. Nice enough house, desirable location, reasonable price, etc. We had planned to allow up to three months to sell othe house with a view to moving in the summer holidays…let’s face it, you need another three months for all the conveyancing malarkey to get its act together. And even then, there are pitfalls. Anything could go wrong on any property in the chain, and we could all be back to square one at a moment’s notice.
After the initial month or two of finding this all very stressful, I just couldn’t be stressed about it any more without going nuts (okay, without going more nuts), and adopted the Doris Day approach (you know, que sera sera). Loved one on the other hand is still stressed out by it. Mainly because through all this he’s not been tackling the keep-the-house-tidy-all-the-time issue on a daily basis, so his exposure to the situation is more low-level, and the stress has built up slowly. He is now a tightly-wound ball of anxiety about the whole thing.
There is a house which, although not perfect, has felt instinctively the right house to buy. This waiting game means we may not get it. This has worried loved one sufficiently to drop the asking price on our own house even further, but in all honesty I can’t be bothered to worry about it any more. If we don’t get it, there’ll either be another equally good or better house available when we are ready, or there’ll be nothing and we will have to rent for a while.
One thing, though. The waiting game has played havoc with our timing. Our plan to move in the summer holidays and cause minimal disruption for the children and schooling is looking increasingly unrealistic.
How much does that matter I wonder? How difficult will it be for the kids to adjust in the middle of term? Will they be able to catch up? Will they make friends easily? Answers on a postcard…
I was just reading this blog from Transforming Decor that tells us that 90 per cent of home buyers look online to find the home they want. This is a US statistic, but I bet the UK are not far behind.
I reckon, much as we love to look at the papers to see what houses are going for in our area, or to have a ‘wishful thinking’ moment, most of us who are serious about buying go to one of the major websites, such as Rightmove, Zoopla or Primelocation. As it happens, Rightmove have been the best ones for us, though I gather that Zoopla is good for finding homes being sold privately or by auction, and Primelocation is great for London buyers. Newspaper marketing is more to give agents visibility for people who might put their house on the market.
What does this mean for us? Well, when we chose our agent we made sure they felt the same way as we did about this; indeed, we were online before we were in print.
However, you can never be sure. Your buyer might just be an empty nester who doesn’t believe in computers, for instance. So we’ve been regularly in the papers too.
But I have to say, I wish there was a house-selling equivalent of online dating. You get matched up to your ideal buyer, you see if you get on, and if not, you get matched up to the next one. The current system is similar, but wouldn’t it be great to have such a service?
Especially if they give you your money back if they don’t get you a buyer within 3 months…
No news, I’m afraid. Short of dropping our price further or going directly into rented – both of which prevent us from having the house we would like – we’re in house-move limbo right now.
Not that this is a bad thing. Now that I’ve got over the initial stress of trying to keep the house tidy every second of every day (an ideal recipe for a nervous breakdown), I have assumed that we will always get enough notice to make the place beautiful so I’m not stressing out every time the kids trample biscuit crumbs into the carpet. I’m also making sure I enjoy what time I do have left while I’m still here.
I know some people who, once they know they’re moving, stop talking to their local friends and neighbours. Admittedly house moving is stressful, but I would like to think that that’s when you enjoy your friends even more; they might even give you a hand with the packing while enjoying time together. Some friendships don’t last after a move. That’s as maybe – these days lives are tremendously busy – but surely that means it’s even more important that we savour the friendship now, while we can.
Relocation complications
Posted on: 25/05/2011
Remember last week we were excited because we had actually had an offer that we felt was almost worth accepting? The couple originally came to us with an offer nearly ten percent under the asking price, on the basis that they wanted to do the kitchen.
We didn’t want to pay for their kitchen – if it had been a fabulous kitchen already we would have asked more money for the house in the first place. We said no. They then came back with an offer less than five percent under the asking price, which would have been a struggle but possibly manageable. They went away on holiday, leaving us to deliberate.
They came back yesterday and dropped their offer back down to the original price. We said no. Again.
So we are buyer-free once more. Loved one used the well-used cliché, ‘We’re back to square one again’. I didn’t like how that sounded, however true it may be, so I likened the situation to a game of snakes and ladders. Every time we get a viewing, we’re going up a very short ladder. Every time we get an offer, we’re going up a big ladder, Every time someone doesn’t like the house much after a viewing, we slide down a small snake. Every time we get dumped in sewage by people trying to mess with our heads, we slide down a large snake.
I’m not a big fan of snakes right now. Our offer on the other property had been accepted; they even went to offer on the house they liked, but even they couldn’t compromise enough to make it work, and nor should they.
I have been philosophical about this so far. But now I’m writing it down I do feel a certain level of anger about how insultingly these people behaved. Am I being over-sensitive? Are house buyers always like this? I would like to think not, though I can’t be too sure. We know our own house is on at a reasonable price.
We also know it’s a buyers market. But that doesn’t mean the buyer can insult us and get away with it. Bring on a better class of buyer, that’s what I say. And we’ll keep rolling the dice until one comes along.
Moving house: some good news at last
Posted on: 18/05/2011
Would you believe it? We’ve actually had an offer on our house.
It’s almost a reasonable one, and we’re hoping they can stretch the extra couple of grand we need when they get back from their trip, which would mean we can actually get on with our lives. You know, put down roots properly at last.
Of course, the flip side of the coin (and let’s not forget it’s a long and uncertain journey to completing the move) is that I will have to start tugging up roots where I live now.
Hold on a second. That sounds like I will start to withdraw from my current life, so that by the time we leave I’ll not be in touch with anyone. That couldn’t be further from the case. I’ve blogged before about living life to the full. And that includes living here. Until the hour we leave, I am going to enjoy it for what it is. And those roots are going to stay here.
They’re just going to have to stretch a little.
Daily Home Blessing Hour
Posted on: 11/05/2011
We had two viewings today. And the house was amazingly untidy this morning. As I was beautifying it, with smallest one most unimpressed at the speed with which I scurried from room to room tidying, dusting, hoovering (she only approves if I stay in the same room as her), I was reminded of the fact that nowadays I tend to delete my Flylady emails without reading them.
This doesn’t mean that I think Flylady is rubbish. Quite the opposite. I totally get it, agree with it and endorse it for anyone who, like me, is not a naturally tidy person. What it means is that I have digested Flylady’s wisdom and taken it on board, and don’t need the emails any more. I still don’t shine my sink very often. I don’t have a particularly effective morning routine. I haven’t mastered the weekly home blessing hour. But I am considerably less disorganized than I was. And better than that, I can clean happily now without resenting the fact that I have to. And I am continuing to try and improve my household effectiveness.
The weekly home blessing hour is a fabulous idea. You spend an hour (you can break it into ten minute chunks if you want) and you get all the necessary cleaning done, from changing the sheets to cleaning the mirrors. Don’t get me wrong, it won’t be perfect, but you’ll have clean floors, clean sheets, empty bins, and a dust-free home. It’s all down to her unashamed use of the timer. (Incidentally, the timer is great for the kids too).
What with smallest one being more than a little messy at the table, and me being up to my ears in studies right now, we’ve had help with the cleaning while the house is up for sale. But today we had another viewing on the house, so it was up to me to get it beautiful this time.
It took two hours rather than one, mainly due to needing to give the kitchen a thorough clean and having been too lazy to put a large quantity of laundry away last night. But still, with my audio book playing to me (and smallest one crawling after me, screaming fit to burst every time I left a room, which was immensely cute), it was enjoyable all the same.
We have another viewing tomorrow. Somehow tonight’s dinner mostly stayed off the floor, so I can probably deal with all the mess in less than half an hour. And I’m sort of looking forward to it.
With this little flurry of viewings, I’m thinking of it as my daily home blessing hour.
Posting in the dark
Posted on: 29/04/2011
This evening, trying to sell our house has had an interesting consequence on my posting. Allow me to explain…
In order to make the rather small bedrooms look bearable, we removed the bunk bed from one of them. This required putting middle child into smallest one’s room, and relegating smallest one to the study. Which is where I am now. Typing on a black keyboard (why are they always black these days?) in the dark.
Needless to say, spelling mistakes are frequent, though I hope to have caught them all before posting this. Actually, I could easily be using my laptop in a different room, but loved one is away, leaving his nice large screen handily available, and the small breathing sounds drifting across from the corner are just too delightful to miss.
I do wish we had a blackout blind in this room, though. Now the nights are shorter, smallest one has a tendency to wake earlier. I heard you can get blackout coating you can paint on blinds, which sounds really weird, but I’m tempted to check it out all the same. (I would have got a blackout blind for this room in the first place but for two reasons – one, they’re all boring and ugly, and two, I don’t want mould to start growing if we forget to raise the blind every so often, a problem that has occurred in other rooms in the past.)
So I’m posting in the dark. It’s nice, once you’ve got your fingers on the right place on the keyboard. Makes me realise that to be an accidental touch typist (I never actually learned) is still considerably handier than loved one’s fast two-finger typing, no doubt he would be struggling right now.
But then he’s the sort of person who would bother changing the light bulb in the discreet little desk lamp so he didn’t have to type in the dark. It all evens out in the end, doesn’t it?
I was going to leave it at that, but with perfect timing one of my two cats, fed up with me not being downstairs slouching on the sofa with an empty lap, has made a point of sitting between the keyboard and the screen, silhouetted beautifully against my typing (which I can of course no longer see properly). He patiently waits for me to finish, unaware that I’d be done by now if he hadn’t made himself into such a work of art.
Purring from the silhouette in front. Tiny snores from the cot behind. And an awful lot of spelling mistakes. That’s tonight’s post: ironic, yet fantastic.
braindribbles 