We turn the key and the door to our new home opens smoothly. Some might be tempted to go for the over-the-threshold carry but we have already agreed to go for a threshold rollover instead, purely for health and safety reasons. Finally we are inside and look around. It is all ours, warts and all.
It is, in fact, only the second time we have stepped inside the property, this despite various requests for another viewing and a lengthening list of things to check or measure. Can we look inside the shed(s)? What are the house carpets like? (Who thinks to stare at your feet when you are being shown around by the charming resident owner, a lady who offers us coffee and a plate of biscuits.) Is there a space in the kitchen for our dishwasher? Can we take a peek in the attic? Will our Martin fit in the garage? (Actually we discovered the answer to this one by a sneaky drive past and rapid deployment of a tape measure. The answer is... not without some modifications to the garage roof.)
When it came to collecting the keys to our new home, and given that the estate agent's office is twenty miles further on down the road, we asked if the keys could be left somewhere nearer, with a neighbour perhaps. We'd almost lost hope of avoiding the forty mile round trip when word finally reached us that the keys would be left for us to collect, in the village post office.
Then another call came in, this time from our removers, saying that they were at that moment emptying the house we are buying of its contents and, because no packing had been done in advance, this was taking far longer than planned. Would we mind some stuff being left behind in one room until our moving in, four days later? This we agreed to, for the sake of the sanity of the removers, but little doubts were beginning to sink in.
We were, therefore, beginning to feel a little more apprehensive than we might have been. For the last seven weeks we had been asking ourselves whether we had missed anything, whether our memories of that all too brief viewing were accurate and more particularly, should we have lifted at least a few carpets or peered into a cupboard or two before we made our offer. Looking back it seems like a mad gamble - not the sort of behaviour we undertake routinely - and our sensible selves are shouting back at us, telling us off. Then, added to this, we would be moving into a house which still has property of the previous owner inside, something any solicitor will tell you is a no-no. It can lead to chaos. It relies on trust, which the solicitor never recognises as existing. In the real world, however, trust does exist, hence our acquiescence to this arrangement. But is it misplaced?
Then it got worse. Midway through the very day we are supposed to be collecting those keys and getting access to our new home, crossing the threshold, we hear the owner has not moved out and has yet to sign the necessary papers transferring ownership. We are now getting frantic. Calls to the estate agent and to our solicitor take place with little joy. It is a Friday and nobody works at weekends, of course. We have packed almost everything, disconnected our appliances and our removers are booked for the following Monday. Do we have to cancel this? We pace around our box-filled house like people possessed.
The weekend passes with no communications from anyone, our blood pressures are rising steadily as we know that at 9am on Monday a team of removers will start loading our belongings into vans but we have nowhere for them to go, no house to move into. By 11am the first van is loaded. Then, finally, at 11.30 the call comes. We have a house (something that should have happened three days earlier) and we can now collect the keys. We all hit the road early afternoon then climb the steps to our new front door an hour or so later.
Our vendor has indeed left belongings in one bedroom - it was full to the ceiling - but she had neglected to mention that neither of the sheds had been emptied, nor the space beneath the house. Odd items of her property are scattered everywhere indoors, left behind as she moved on.
Our team of removers did their best, emptying the bedroom and then taking away two lawnmowers, but this left a long list of items (nothing of particular value) for us to deal with. When you buy a house, unless agreed otherwise everything within it becomes yours, which means you can dispose of it as you choose. But why should we have to?
All this additional hassle and stress we could have done without; any sympathy we had for the previous owner evaporated from the moment she began to mess us around by delaying the sale. But we now put behind us the distain with which we have been treated by the seller and we move on. The new house is just what we need and we love the location. There is much about the house we want to change (starting with those carpets) to make it ours but we shall enjoy the big project that lies ahead.
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