We shall see how it pans out

Monday June 30, 2008

Late yesterday evening I pushed my chair back from the desk, announced to the world that my brain hurt, and plodded off downstairs to cook my [late] dinner.  The filing is done.  The forms are all filled in.  The letter to the solicitor is done.  All that’s needed before we motor the assembled pack over to Minehead tomorrow is a couple of signatures from Graham.

So, what shall I do with myself today, then?

My first feeling is that I’ve earned a quiet day at home, dozing happily until it’s time to go collect Graham tonight.  On the other hand, I do need to get some tasty, healthy food in for myself so an outing seems appropriate at some point.

We shall see how it pans out after an egg-on-toast breakfast. It’d be even better by the seaside.

By the seaside

Moving on

Sunday June 29, 2008

Graham is working a longer weekend than usual ‘to get the season going’.  Yup.  The ’season’ has started, with the arrival of the first batch of genuine holiday makers in place of the more usual special eventers.  The first two weeks tend to be mostly old folks, with special needs people coming along for the second week.  Then it turns over to ‘family’ weeks, easing back down again in September to a return of the oldies.  I’m not going to say or think anything bad about it because the chances are we’ll be living there for our short inter-house period somewhere around mid-August.

There’s a plus-side about the longer weekend, too.  Gives me a better chance to get the household files in good order, and the outstanding shredding done.  Seems that, last February, I solved the problem by bundling up a load of paper and shoving it down the front of my files.  Sometimes I get round the ‘be sure your sins will find you out’ situation on household filing by saying that I may be dead first.

Either way, I’m on course for an early morning trip with Graham to the solicitor with all the paper work done needed to kick the sale off on the legal side.  That’ll be a good job done.  My next task is to root through all my clothes cupboards and drawer and to dispose of anything I’ve not worn for more than two years.  That’s most of it.  How much clothing does a retired, sedentary bloke need anyway?

I phoned the agent in Swansea yesterday to check on the status of the house we liked so much from the description and the aerial shots.  It’s in the final stages of the legalities, with a cash buyer.  Hey ho.  There are more.  I told the young woman how well it fitted our needs and she was kind enough to put a PDF file of about eight similar properties together and send it to me via email.

Not a single one of them is on the Internet sales site!  We knew this was likely to be the case, but not quite as markedly.  So, even though the technology is there to do all the foot work in the comfort of your computer room, going off on your viewing tour only when you’ve arrived at a very short list to physically visit, it still comes down to trawling the agents, reading piles of house particulars in a local coffee house, and setting up your own tour.

We’ll be trolling over to Swansea (a two-hour drive) one day during the coming week to get a feel for it all.

Hey ho.  Busy is good for me, I know that.  I’d rather be sitting by the seaside, though.

By the seaside

I don’t move so fast

Saturday June 28, 2008

Yesterday fizzled along softly after the excitement of the SOLD sign. I leafed through the five-part stack of forms to be sure I have all the information I need to process them tomorrow, and put them on one side ready to get them done and dusted this morning when I’ve finished here.

Today is going to have to be quiet, too, because I going to get that job done if it kills me.  It won’t of course, but I may well do serious damage to anyone who interrupts me once I get going.

I’ve started on a list of the things we need to do before completion.  High among them is to verify the status of the bungalow we liked so much–it’s still showing as ‘Sold subject to contract’ but that could have changed and we may still be in with a chance.  That would make our stay in the caravan very short indeed.

I do seriously need a quiet day to get these papers done, though.  There was a time when I’d have been able to zap through them between first and second coffees of the day.  I don’t move so fast now.

 

Promenade, Burnham-on-Sea
made for slow strolls

Now the whole world knows

Home from dropping Graham off at the caravan, to find a massive wad of papers waiting for me from the solicitor–forms to be read and ticked off.  It’ll take me all day tomorrow to fill that lot in.  Just my luck for them to arrive the day Graham takes himself off.  Now there’s no way I can fob the job off onto him.

I’ll have them all done and wrapped up together with the HIP and the other job ready for hand delivery on Monday.  It’ll make a good excuse for me to drive over to Minehead and, once there, to take a stroll along the front with a big, greasy bag of chips in my hand.

Then, tummy filled with my routine first day home alone lunch–rosti, egg, and fried tomatoes, I was just settling down when I heard a strange little noise outside.  The little man with the van had been outside pinning a ‘SOLD’ notice over the previous ‘For Sale’ sign.  Now the whole world knows.

 

Sold, probably

Not a bad day’s work, really

Friday June 27, 2008

I was in the shower when the phone rang.  Didn’t hear it so I was taken off my guard when Graham came along to tell me about it.

“Seems we’ve sold the house,” he said, looking a little shaky.

“Oh, really?”  I said.  “How much for, to whom, and by which of the two agents?”

The answers were not too clear at this stage.  Graham and the [fired] agent had some more negotiation to do before getting down to finalities.

When, after about half an hour, he was satisfied that the deal was worth serious consideration, Graham handed the phone over to me.  The price he’d pencilled in was at the very bottom end of acceptable, but a cool £25k over that put forward by the agent a week ago.  The first thing the agent said was that he’d got a little more than that, and plomped another £2k in my lap.  Clever that, making up to a guy you’ve offended enough for him to sack you is best done with cash.

“Will that be acceptable, John?” the agent asked.

“Probably,” I said.  “Talk me through the chain, mortgage and timings again, one more time, and from the top.”

He took a deep breath and gave me the details in an organised fashion.

“Ok,” I said. “Well done.  We have a deal.”

“Great.  Thanks.  I’ll get the details out to all parties promptly, and we can jump to the starting line.”

I put the phone down quietly and carefully.

That was when we did our “WE DUN IT” jig.

“Right,” I said.  “There’s no way I’m going to be up to fixing lunch today.  And I want to get out of the house, too.  What say you we go visit Burnham-on-Sea and find a seaside eatery?”

I was astonished at the response.  Not a word of argument.  He just put his coat on and stood tapping his feet while I struggled into my socks and shoes.  Two years I’ve been struggling to get a visit to Burnham-on-Sea out of him and what does it take?  A house sale, that’s what.

Anyway, keeping in mind that no house sale or purchase is a done deal until contracts have been signed and exchanged, and deposits paid, the likely sequence of event is this:

• Two days before completion we shall move ourselves, Dolly, and the patio plants down to the caravan at West Quantoxhead.  I’m looking forward to seeing Dolly’s reaction to finding herself in the caravan once more–she’s always loved living in them.
• On completion day our furniture and stuff will be moved into storage.  Life on the cliff-tops at West Quantoxhead will resume.
• Somewhere along the way we shall have started the search for our new house, in the Swansea cachement area of South Wales.  There is no great rush;  we are reliably informed that prices are decreasing at about 1% per month, and likely to keep on doing so until the credit crunch is done. We have a short-list of about ten suitable properties, mostly bungalows, and all either empty or on the market with the promise of ‘no forward chain’.  That way, when we press the button, it’ll take a maximum of eight weeks before we move in.
• The moving in steps will of course depend on the condition of the new property.  We may need to clean and decorate and, possibly, do a bit of fixing before we can take up residence and there’s no way of planning that until we get further along the path.

So, that’s the plan.

Lunch turned out to be a large platter of roast Welsh lamb with all the trimmings for me, and a Cornish pasty meal for Graham–he doesn’t do roast meals generally and certainly not mutton or lamb.

I sat back, patting my tummy and feeling virtuous.  Just as I’ve been saying all these years, a good, balanced meal of traditional ingredients is healthy and not overly-fattening.  There are rather a lot of red-faced doctors and dieticians about the place just now, having had their ‘healthy life-style’ theories thrown back at them.  When they started persuading us back in the seventies that we were eating all the wrong things, there were very, very few fat people around.  Now look at us.

Anyway. That is a more or less accurate account of how we came to take our lunch at the Bay View Cafe, looking out over the bay towards the Hinkley Point nuclear power station, and followed it with a pleasant stroll along the Promenade with ice cream treats half-way through. Not a bad day’s work, really.