A home found, maybe

Sunday, October 21st, 2007

It’s early days yet but we think we’ve found ourselves a house to buy. If all goes smoothly we should be moving before Yule. We’ve put in an offer on a three-bedroomed property with a huge and very private garden, plus adjoining garage that’s been converted into living space. The offer has been accepted and now we’ve just got to sort out a conveyancer on Monday and the lender is arranging for the extended survey we’ve asked (and paid) for.

A standard house survey often involves little more than someone standing outside the property you want to buy and ticking off some boxes. For all that effort it costs around £200 and you get a one- or two-page report. The idea of a valuation is to spare you any nasty surprises, allowing you to either reduce your offer to take account of work being done or back off completely from the purchase. There’s an extended valuation available where the valuer has to enter the property and not only report on its structural health but also stuff like insulation, heating appliances and other bits and pieces. So we’ve gone for that, which is double the price. Hopefully it won’t turn anything up that merits a rethink, but it will give us peace of mind that we’re not buying a turkey of a house.

We’ve had several run-ins with the estate agent calling us up repeatedly to push, threaten and cajole us into getting everything done now and yesterday. We can’t, they know we can’t, but they want us to move faster than we are able, or willing. So we threatened back, told him if he wanted the house sold any quicker, find another buyer but otherwise stop calling us every five minutes or he’d have to explain to the vendor how he lost them their sale. I’ve said it before, but I really, really don’t like estate agents. Most are falsely nice until you put in an offer, then turn into brutal, borderline-blackmailing, little thugs. I’m calling him up Monday with the name of our conveyancer, that should make him back off for a while, and I’m going to mention the extended survey because I know it will make him sweat for fear of something being noticed in the survey that would lead to us reducing our offer.

The house appears good to move into without any need for immediate redecoration. The people who currently own it appear to have maintained it well, and are leaving all fixtures and fittings including carpets, chest freezer, dishwasher and two-year-old fitted kitchen. The garden is enclosed by high fences and hedging, has a shed, but is overall a blank sheet of lawn ready for us to put our mark upon. There’s room for a bee-hive or two, a chicken coup and run, and two or three vegetable patches. Our first priority with that space will be to prepare specific areas for spring plantings (a bit of new soil, some manure, create the raised beds) and get some fruit trees into the ground during the winter months. I intend to cultivate an herb garden near the kitchen door for both culinary and medicinal purposes, and am already thinking about design and implementation. I have several excellent books on approaching garden layouts from a pagan perspective, as well as a number that provide information on plants that are useful to grow for all sorts of reasons.

It’s hard not to get excited. Our current rented property, being stone, suffers from extreme damp problems and the lettings agency has recently provided two dehumidifiers to protect our stuff such as books from further damp incursions. We’re getting rid of several large containers of extracted water per day. Our garden is too steep, too rocky, and too plagued by slugs to do any of the things we’ve long wanted to do. So the new house opens up possibilities we’ve long wanted to pursue. It’s also handy for getting into two cities quickly by train, and visiting friends from Lancashire (and them visiting us) will take less than an hour by train, about 45 minutes by car. At present it can take up to 2 hours by car, 3 by a combination of train and bus.

I’m doing a garden audit this week, seeing which plants we are taking in their entirety when we move, which ones we are taking cuttings from, how many plant pots we need to buy.

I’ll be continuing the packing away of ornaments, books, records, CDs, DVDs, and infrequently used kitchen equipment, a job I began over a month ago now. Everything is going to be whittled down until we have a ‘core’ group of boxes come moving day that we have marked as essential, meaning those few boxes will be the only ones we absolutely have to unpack straightaway.

We’re going to hire a removals firm for the bulky stuff but we’ve had several friends offer to come help on moving day, whenever that is, which is both heart-warming and reassuring as it’s going to be stressful. We hope to complete the sale a week or two before quitting our current rented property, so we’ll be able to move the most awkward items—such as our tank of tropical fish—before the main madness commences, and do our own cleaning of carpets, kitchen, bathroom and so on.

Reading this back, I appear to be far more organised and capable of strategic planning than I would ever readily admit to. Usually I live up to the Piscean archetype, spending a significant amount of time with my head in the clouds. But not right now. I’ve contacted the local police to make enquiries about the area, I’ve spent time online researching crime statistics, quality of local schools, train timetables… Yeah. I’ve done a lot of background I suspect most people don’t bother with. It’s partly because I’m praying to the goddess that this move goes well, and works out brilliantly for us, but that involves work on our part as much as blessings from the Powers That Be; it’s also because, being a gay couple, while our equality and rights are now enshrined in law, there’s still a risk every time D and I move of ending up in homophobe central.

I guess black and Asian people feel the same wobbles when they move into new areas, especially if they’re majority white. Everywhere we ever move to is majority heterosexual and so there’s always some degree of risk that one or two will be mentally unstable homophobes. Thankfully, UK society is far less tolerant of them in 2007 than it was, say, back in 1987.

At the end of the day, though, life is about change and it never comes without a degree of risk. Everything is a gamble. So you do what you have to do, deal with whatever comes, do the best you can to pre-empt, to plan, to negotiate, to prepare. We’re doing all that without descending into morbid fears and worries. The new house has every chance of being everything we want, at least for the next few years. Beyond that, who can ever say? Annoyingly, but to be expected, we’re now appreciating where we currently live all the more keenly and with an edge of sadness to be leaving it behind…

categories: rattle bag