a view through my own eyes

A while ago I checked through the logs and noticed that I was getting hit by Google for the above search phrase and accordingly posted up a list of other weird that was shown in the logs.

At a later date I even suggested that I try to find the answer to the question: What flavour crisps does James Bond eat or failing that get to be the first hit on Google for that phrase.

Well after mailing the official sites for Messrs Connery, Dalton and Brosnan and even posting a question on the Roger Moore forum I am still no closer to an answer. So as Christine mentioned at the time, in the 1950s when Fleming wrote the books the only option was salt and shake plain crisps.

Anyway with the assistance of some friends bunging in the odd link (thanks guys), I can now confirm that Googling for: What flavour crisps does James Bond eat? Does get this site as the number one link!

Hurrah.

Catching up on what started this in the first place, where are some odd search strings I have spotted over the last few weeks:
burnt off cornea
programmed receiver to watch cricket
sportsman whitstable
merlimont wifi
I am a prisoner trapped in my own mental state
here we go again on my own
microsoft shitty link
church in warwickshire and how much do they cost
glue accident

An odd selection, not as peculiar as last time. I guess that the only bonus was that none of them are for porn or gambling.

The vendor of the new house phoned us this evening to let us know that the mortgage surveyor had been. Apparently he stopped long enough to measure all the rooms, have a poke round and have a cup of tea. Then apparently we will put stuff in the computer and send it off to the mortgage people.

She then asked when our real survey results would be in, I mentioned that we should get a call wednesday evening giving us a brief synopsis of the report he will send us a few days later.

She asked if I could call her when we know, so I replied “only if its not late, he has been known to phone us into the evening (he has) and I do not like to disturb people”. “No it is OK is on nights and I will be awake until around midnight just call me please.”

I get the feeling that she is more tense than we are.

A couple of people have recently asked us: Why are you guys moving?

So in no particular order here are some reasons:

1. parking is on street, sometimes we can park in the same street, sometimes it can easily be a five minute walk to the car which to be honest is a pain in the backside
2. our current place is old (circa 1880) and is starting to need work being done on it, new roof, new windows etc etc, whilst we can fix the place up it it won’t help any of the other points in this list
3. the area is slowly turning into studentville and so will eventually end up with the antisocial element that can be prevalent as seen in other areas of Canterbury
4. if we decide to expand our family then the current place is not going to be big enough
5. none of the rooms are square and so furniture and storage are an interesting proposition
6. house prices keep going up and are doing so faster than the rate of inflation, which means that more expensive properties we can afford now could well be out of our reach in a couple of years time as they move further away
7. we do not believe that in heating terms it is as energy efficient as it could be, that is borne out by the number of draughts and cross winds in the place
8. it is very much mrspaos house, mrspao lived there before I did and though we have been there together for almost nine years in some ways it is not “our” house
9. it is likely that Canterbury City Council will introduce restricted parking into the are (they have in other areas), which means that we then have to fork out around £200 a year for the privilege of being able to park on our own road – should we find a space (see no 1 above).

Went back to the house yesterday and took some friends for sanity checking that we were not making an awfull mistake.

Spent a couple of hours there, its strange as this time we have met the vendors and they seem like really nice people and we can see how proud they are of the house. Its odd to think that in a few weeks it will be ours.

I think that in some ways we are still mourning the loss of the previous place as in many ways it was so right. That is not to say that this new place is so wrong more a case that in some ways it feels like getting second prize. Talking to Chris and Caz today its nice to know that we are not going mad, they admitted that the place they have now was a second choice as the first fell through and although they are happy there and have been for eight years, they do still wonder how things would have been in the first place.

Life it seems is full of what ifs.

So bollocks to that. It is hardly our fault that the owner of the first choice place was an unreasonable fuckwit, we have to look to our own future and that of a not inconcievable family (no there is not one on the way so don’t go getting any ideas).

So what won’t be getting:
1. a place which absolutely needs the foundations thoroughly checked
2. a place where the integral garage roof is knackered and so the joists which enter the house are starting to suffer from wet rot
3. a potentially enormous bill (looking at 20-30 sterling so we are told if it is foundations) to get the place right
4. a place that does not meet modern environmental energy saving standards
5. a place that is definately going to need the electrics rewiring – more money
6. a place that will need the 1960′s plumbing/heating replaced – more money

So here are some positives from a practical view, it is hard to do otherwise as emotionally we were attached to the other place and had to turn our backs on it and so its not something that we are prepared to do until we _know_ that it is ours:
1. the place is going to hold its value due to the quality of construction – compare it to new estates being built in this country and you will understand
2. by moving now we do not have to provide a home information pack (HIP) on the current property, these are going to be legal requirements from the 1st of June and require a seller of a property to demonstrate that the house is of worthy condition via a survey, you also have to produce an energy usage guide (how expensive is it to heat) and provide the council searches amongst other stuff. Not that there is anything fundamentally wrong with this house but under the current rules if the purchaser finds something wrong after purchase thats their tough luck for not checking it out in advance of contract completion and there is no comeback Also its likely to cost up to a couple of grand. Older houses that are less energy efficient to heat are not likely to hold their value as well.
3. we do not need to find somewhere to rent where we can take five cats
4. we only move the once
5. we are within easy reach of Canterbury, Sandwich and other places in the area – it will be ten minutes away from my Grans rather than up to half an hour
6. mrspao may finally decide to finish to learn driving
7. there are plenty of busses to/from Canterbury and they only take around 15 minutes
8. it is a chance to be part of a village community – around where we are now it is turning into studentville
9. the property is stunning and incredibly well equipped

Come wednesday we should have the results verbally from the surveyor, then we will finally have confirmation that the house is as good as we think it is.

When we put this house on the market we half filled a friends garage with “stuff”, and cleaned and tidied and cleaned and tidied – and repeat.

Once the house was on with the estate agent, they did their job: twelve viewings in two weeks. Which meant that every day the house was polished, hoovered and cat shit was removed from the litter tray – I even did some washing up whilst mrspao hid our laundry in the boot of the car. Three offers later the house was sold to the the nice young couple who were childhood sweethearts, first time buyers and keen – very keen.

Too bloody keen.

Every now and again we get a call from the estate agent: “they want to have another look round”. So every time we blast through the house making it spotless – it only takes a couple of hours but to be honest its a pain in the arse.

Tomorrow will be the fifth time they have viewed the house.

So once again we have gone through the house – the hoovering will be done in the morning and to be honest there was not that much to do, but still its a pain. We feel we have to go through these hoops as until the contracts are exchanged they can still pull out. Our copy of the contract was signed off and dropped off to the solicitors a few days ago, hopefull they have done the same – then finally we will get confirmation of the date we have agreed to leave here.

Once that exchange has taken place if the estate agent phones with “they want to have a quick peek in the understairs cupboard”, I will ask him to tell them to bloody wait, as things stand this house should be theirs in three weeks.

As for our purchase, the mortgage is sorted; which was trivial as the detail of the address only needed changing and the searches should be under way. The mortgage company are performing their house valuation survey next tuesday (which will take around half an hour) and our full independant survey is next wednesday (which will take most of a day). So fingers crossed for a positive phone call next wednesday.

In other news, the logs mapped to the Geotracking map have shown that this blog has started getting hits from someone in Beijing. My brother happens to be in Beijing at the moment – so clearly this blog has passed the Peoples Democratic Republic of China’s web filtering.

Hi Mark!

Finally the new house does come with a dishwasher!

…at the end of the day from yesterdays viewings there was an obvious (to us at least) house and a couple of possibilities.

We cannot honestly say that we looked at every house that we fancied and could afford in the area but we did see most of those that are available now. In six weeks there would be other properties but then some of these may well have sold.

An offer was made and has been accepted.

Now the machinations of estate agents, solicitors, mortgage advisors and surveyors begins again.

This time though its different, we are not celebrating and we will not do so until we know that the place is definately going to be ours. Last time we went out for a nice meal at our favourite Thai restaurant and got a parking ticket whilst we were there (we forgot to pay for the car park) – perhaps that was a sign and we should have taken notice.

It has been a mad couple of days looking at houses:

1. double end to end garage, acoustically treated lounge but stupidly sized bedrooms
2. the flower house, there were flowers or the images of flowers everywhere
3. mad gurkha house that stank of cooking oil and had a railway line 3 ft across and 20 ft below the kitchen door
4. the barn conversion that allthough nice was more of a holiday home
5. the B&B with the old mad bloke and imported russian bride, which we could not look all round as one of the rooms had a couple sleeping in whilst we were there
6. the 16th century cottage that needed quite a bit of work but did have a double garage, a barn, half an acre of land and a swimming pool
7. the grade 2 listed cottage split over many floors and full of character but the owner obviously was not ready to leave yet
8. the grade 2 listed cottage that was cute, had cupboards everywhere but needed the cellar damp treated and the whole lot rewiring
9. the stunning bespoke house that was a couple of years old and obviously a labour of love for the builder who built and lived in it
10. the new house made of megablox* and cardboard that smelt of fags
11. the new house made of megablox* and cardboard that had around a hundred halogen lights and a integral 30″ flat screen TV in the kitchen

So have we made a decision?

Maybe.

Will we still want to look at the converted windmill?

Possibly.

*megablox as we all know is inferior to Lego

It is not every day that you get to see a copy of a solicitors letter that is downright rude and insulting about yourself. Today we did.

I am not particularly impressed to be see that the vendor and his solicitor have doubts about our intentions particularly when you account for the amount of time, effort and money that we have expended in pursuing this purchase. All along the way we have been more than reasonable to the extent that we will be out of this place in the middle of February.

Perhaps we are expecting too much from the vendor.

So this weekend we are going looking at other houses, if one of those fits the bill then to put it bluntly I am looking forward to telling the estate agent to instruct the vendor to take his house and shove it up his arse.

In fact I may well do that anyway. In the meantime they can stew whilst we look elsewhere.

Despite the reports from two surveyors and a structural engineer, the vendor of the house we were after does not believe that the integral garage roof needs replacing, nor does he accept that the cracks in the wall are likely to be due to foundation issues which require further investigation to be certain.

Apparently the “cracks are historical and nothing to worry about”.

Nor apparently will the vendor entertain the idea of getting the foundations checked which require a minor excavation and a probe sunk in the ground and takes less than a day.

So not wanting to bugger around the purchasers of our house, we will be moving in February to a rented place in Whitstable which is cat friendly.

There are good points about this:
1. we can take our time finding a new house we want to buy and have no one rushing us.
2. we will probably be better off financially for a while as renting is certainly going to be cheaper than the mortgage.

With any joy we can save enough money to go on a big holiday this year – will be nice to return to Boston and New England for a while.

Guess which cat came in last night with a gashed leg?
Guess which cat spent the night with a plastic cone on his head?
Guess which cat made the vet comment “He definately does not want us to look at that, I am going to have to knock him out before he does us any damage”?
Guess which cat now has a stitched up leg?
Guess which cat is really really cheerfull?
Guess which cat may end up having to have fresh bandages on his leg every four days if he manages to split his stitches which will mean more anaesthetic?

Click picture for full size.

Merlin