I know I’ve been pretty quiet around here lately but we’re still without internet at home (don’t ask – a story for another day) and work is frantic so I’m struggling to find time. While everyone is waiting I thought I’d let you know that the trap in my house has been disarmed.

Its the downstairs loo door – here are the photos of it from either side:

Can you spot the deliberate mistake?

The cross-piece bit that over hangs the door has been switched sides at some point, so that the handle and latch-lifting bits now don’t operate anywhere near the bit they’re supposed to. So if you go inside, and shut the door, …. then the latch drops and you are locked in!

Happily I’ve removed the hook for the cross-piece. OK so you can’t shut the door on the loo but at least you can’t shut yourself in :) Sing while you’re in there?

I’ve packed the camera as I’m away this weekend, so I’m sorry but a word-related house post is all there is for today.

We’ve got most of the furniture assembled now, or at least in the room it is destined for, and the process of unpacking begins. Remember that quite a lot of stuff has been in storage for 18 months. I’ve been entertained by some of the labelling on the boxes and though I’d share.

• Lorna Burford 2005 (the other label on the box reads “stereo, placements, pebble lamp, coasters” which gives you a clue that I’m not actually in the box)
• Things Lorna Can Live Without Jan 06 (ironically, its been unsealed so I can get something at some point!)
• An IKEA Uplighter and a 30cm Farnell Ruler. How Useful
• Contents of Tall Shelves. Burford Jan 06 Can you remember what possessions you haven’t seen in a year and a half were on a shelf in a house you longer live in?? No, me neither!
• My personal favourite: Mugs. Other Things. (on a very large box)
• Spotted yesterday when looking for a bit of N64: Contains the Internet

On the other hand, every box is labelled and dated, which makes me feel like I might be quite organised. There was a comedy moment when someone helping us unpack brought a box off a sainsburys dinner service and asked what was in it as we hadn’t labelled it … the answer is “the dinner service”!!

There’s a tree in the new garden which shouldn’t be there. In general I’m in favour of trees, but this was a horrible big conifer which blocked the light from our garden and next door’s.

Here’s the offender:

And the “after” shot:

Ah, that’s better :)

So we’ve just moved into our new house – its quite large and the mobile signal is quite poor. We’ve got a wireless doorbell and can take the chime around the house with us which is very useful. We had not got round to screwing it to the wall yet so for the last few days its been hanging off the front door handle.

Yesterday, the doorbell rang and when I went to the door, the doorbell had been stolen!! Someone had walked off with it and was ringing it. That’s a really great welcome to a new neighbourhood, isn’t it?

Following the news about our recent house purchase, I promised everyone some photos, so here they are. I’ve only got internet connection at work so I’m afraid I’ve just picked a few of the ones we took on Friday, with the house exactly as we found it.

our bedroom

the basement kitchen

the living room (yes, I straightened my hair, I know it looks different)

one of the top floor rooms … before we touched anything.

So we’ve had thirty bags of rubbish out of the house so far, and the front room looks like a bomb has hit it as we’ve got all our wordly posessions in there while we sort the house out.

The gas is on a card, which is fine but you have to get a new card when you move in and its been a bank holiday so it only arrived today … have you tried cleaning a four storey house with no hot water unless you put a pan on the stove? It felt very victorian! Fingers crossed we might have hot water later on today if Kevin can get the boiler lit.

We did it … we got to the end of the process and we are now Home Owners :)

Its been a rocky road right until the last minute, I hadn’t wanted to blog the completion date being today in case I jinxed the whole thing … and just as well because there was a couple of days in the middle of the week where we didn’t think it was going to happen! The vendor wasn’t able to clear the house in time (he’s only had 5 months warning after all!) and couldn’t move until next week. We had a time constraint on our mortgage so in the end we agreed to pay £2,000 for the contents of the house … with no idea what was actually there.

Suffice to say we’ve got an awful lot of rubbish for that money – some good furniture but also wardrobes still full of clothes, kitchen still equipped and more other things besides. We’ve been there most of the day, cleaning madly and filling rubbish sacks.

Its late now and tomorrow I’m off to fetch furniture from storage, but I wanted to update with my news (and not before it actually happened). Thanks to everyone for their moral support along the way – more stories and photos to follow I promise!

I’m whispering. It loses something when you whisper in a blog post but just imagine that I’m whispering.

I’m whispering because I’m going to write about the house and I’m sure that speaking too loudly will jinx the whole process! Nothing is certain in my mind until I’m holding the keys to our new home, and we’re not there yet. (Here’s the usual insertion about reading previous house posts if you haven’t been keeping up, I gave up linking to direct posts a while ago so that’s a link to the category listing of the whole saga).

The idea of moving to a new place is a little daunting. The flat we live in now is pretty compact and most of our belongings have been in boxes at my parents’ home for almost 18 months now. It will be great to have more room, our own furniture, all our books, and space to make noise and mess and entertain friends. Certainly there are a lot of advantages and reasons to look forward.

The house is much bigger than the flat and that in itself is quite strange, we’ve been under one another’s feet for so long now that it will be almost isolating to have the nearest person half a house away. And the house is going to take a lot of attending to – it needs work doing but just keeping it clean will be a challenge (and looking at the state of the flat, unlikely¹). We’ve been blissfully happy in the flat, joining clubs, making new friends in Leeds and generally running about getting into everything. I am looking forward to the house but a change is always a risk.

However, I’m a forward-facing person and buying our first home is quite a landmark in our lives. Also I’m still homesick for my mother’s home and I’ve lived away from that home and in rented accommodation for almost 8 years now, a home of our own will be great. On the whole I’m happy that its happening!

And, very definitely in a whisper, we may be doing some shifting of things next weekend. So if anyone would like to lend a hand in Birmingham on Saturday or Leeds on Sunday, we’d be grateful. Let me know quite quietly though, won’t you??

¹ Is it good practice to add a note inside brackets? Its like brackets inside brackets or something! What I was going to say was that I can’t be all that bad because I was recently thanked for my housekeeping tips which would seem noteworthy.

I haven’t updated the house saga for a while but its been ticking along in the background. There have been the usual series of alarm and excursions – one misunderstanding about whether planning permission was needed for the basement (happily it wasn’t, as there isn’t any!) and some excitement about indemnities and covenants.

However the searches are in and didn’t reveal anything too scary and now people are asking us to pay for things it looks as if things may be moving … and perhaps so will we :)

We’ve bought a house! If you think you may have read this before, perhaps you’d like to read one of the three previous offers posts.

In an interesting twist, we’ve had an offer accepted on the same house we had an offer accepted on last time, for an amount that takes into account the work that needs doing on it and that we can get a mortgage for. So at least its different!!

Watch this space for more disasters excitement :)

I may have mentioned that we’re buying a house, or houses … if that doesn’t sound familiar you should probably catch up and then come back to this page. So, to recap, the house isn’t falling down.

What I didn’t mention, because I didn’t know when I wrote that post, was that the final valuation of the house was subject to a satisfactory damp survey. The surveyor wasn’t happy to set a market value without a better idea of how damp-proof the cellar of the house was.

This is quite a long post, if you’re not feeling patient then just skip to the last paragraph at this point.

So, we commissioned a damp survey, some very accredited people that the estate agents had dealt with before. Its a house with a cellar containing a kitchen and a bathroom with little ventilation and no central heating, we knew it was damp but we thought some drying-out and better management of the space would help. The survey report recommended that the cellar be completely gutted, false walls and floors fitted, and sumps and pumps to deal with the moisture. At a cost of around 20,000 GBP. If pounds sterling isn’t your local currency then go and convert the numbers. It’s a year’s salary. It also excludes the cost of removing all wall and floor tiles and extending all electrical and plumbing features (so they reach past the new walls) and then refitting the large kitchen and the shower room.

So the damp survey went to the valuation surveyor and the valuation got smaller by the aforementioned 20k. The valuation went to the bank and our mortgage got smaller by the same amount … and so did our offer on the house.

Our revised offer has been refused. The vendor has put the house back on the market and asked for a copy of the damp survey. I feel like everyone else in the world can do do this right, get their foot on the ladder, be normal, and we can’t!! Anyway it looks like our stuff stays in boxes for a while longer …