The Great Bathroom Adventure - episode 3

The big day approaches, the day when our plumber comes back to connect the pipes, fit a shower mixer tap and turn the water on so we can wash our bodies again inside our own home. Whilst we prepare the bathroom walls for this epic moment we manage to find a few more jobs that are suited to this man's particular skills so this won't be his final visit here but it will move the bathroom adventure a little closer to an exciting conclusion.

The familiar white van draws up outside and boxes of tools and lengths of plastic pipe are carried into the house ready for use. The day is then enhanced by sawing and banging noises as a plywood floor is laid (a job for the apprentice) ready for the vinyl floor covering we have chosen, whilst beneath the floor, new pipes are connected, all of which will soon fill with water. Exciting stuff.

Then I get a call to assist with one rather heavy item, our new shower screen. This enormous piece of glass (10mm thick) has to be carried up the steep steps leading to our front door then manoeuvred inside and lifted into place. It is immensely heavy, far beyond what a doctor would prescribe for a human to carry, let alone walk up steps with. I shall not dwell on the anxiety associated with this whole process, the thoughts of what might happen should it slip through the fingers, of the crushing impact upon the toes followed by the shower of broken glass shards across the head and shoulders and possibly into my neck. This is the stuff of many YouTube 'fail' videos, in case you're interested.

When the day comes to an end we have a working shower in place. And we love it. The pale colours are ours. The tile pattern is our choice. It is neat and spacious, big enough to be comfortable in, given that the bathroom itself is a small room. It is just what we imagined. There are a couple of small modifications we'll make so the enormous glass screen is less frightening to walk near (pictures in due course) but we can use the shower. Phase three is complete.

There now comes a pause in the bathroom project schedule as we wait for the availability of a flooring fitter who has the right skills to give us a waterproof floor in the colour we want, which is red. We have decided it has to be red. This is the only colour that works for us with what we have chosen for the walls, so no compromise here. Perhaps we should have planned things a bit better timing-wise to avoid waiting for the floor to go in as this has to precede the final fitting of the toilet and sink but we're not unduly bothered. A bathroom is forever.

During this pause, however, another house project is starting not far away. It is the kitchen, another room we have form for making changes to in previous houses. There is much we find inconvenient about the present layout, the decor is dated beyond words but with a kitchen we must take it in stages since it is a working environment, needed each day, and there are no alternative places where we can cook our food.

[Well actually that isn't quite true. If push comes to shove we could cook in Martin, our campervan, or we could even use our single burner emergency stove, simple, but it would work.]

By now our ripping-out skills are of the highest order and we are keen to deploy these wherever they are needed. We have experience of the way the inside bits of the inner walls of our house are put together and this gives us the confidence to apply these skills to the built-in kitchen cupboard, another enclosed space that we feel we can do away with. It takes less than two days, a hammer, a small crowbar and some muscle to make the walls and the wooden door disappear completely from view. Only on the ceiling does the cupboard outline still remain but suddenly the kitchen has grown in size and we can plan the next phase, an electric cooker to replace the gas one which came with the house and is currently awkwardly positioned in one corner.

Of course, all good projects must start with a plan, so here it is, in 3D so we can better visualize where the different pieces will go. Just as our plumber departs we welcome first of all a gas fitter who is swiftly followed by an electrician whose banging and thumping noises assure us he is making holes in our walls through which his wires can safely run. In two successive days we go from gas to electric cooking and have the power sockets where we want them, ready for the kitchen we want to start to take shape. The gas cooker, far from old, is not wanted so we offer it up online, free to collect. There is no piped gas supply to anywhere local so there's no point in trying to get money for it. It's only useful if you have bottled gas.

All is going to plan inside the house so, given the absence of rain hammering on our windows I am motivated to attack the garden with a spade, removing large chunks of turf from a roughly circular patch of the sloping, mossy area some would refer to as a lawn. We're creating a garden pond and I soon discover that even though it is not actually raining, any hole dug in the garden fills with water very quickly and good waterproof footwear is required. We have a readymade climate-assisted natural shortcut to our pond creating efforts. Normally one would expect to have to line a garden pond with a water-retentive liner but given the amount of rain that regularly falls here and the sloping nature of the land beyond our garden, the pond might just retain water all year without needing anything else. Time will tell, of course, but one unexpected advantage is that we don't have to worry about getting the pond level. The water does this for us.

The Great Bathroom Adventure - episode 2

There is absolutely no point in showing here a picture of the en-suite shower room which is now missing from our bedroom, obviously, because there is nothing to show any more! In fact all there is left is a pile of broken plasterboard pieces and a collection of nail studded timber pieces and I refuse to photograph these. The final part of this project was to relocate a power point, which is fed  from beneath the house, and this gave me the opportunity to correct a couple of other wiring issues too. Perhaps this is not the time to dwell on the confused state of our house's electrical wiring but if we move to the plumbing, this is interesting, to say the least. Our house has had at least one earlier central heating system and the pipes for this still lie beneath our floors, empty of water and gathering dust but causing confusion when it comes to trying to work out what is what. Rather more annoyingly, some of these redundant pipes still rise up through holes in the floorboards and have been chopped off just beneath our interior carpets. The pipe-less holes in the floor whistle when the wind blows hard outside, cold air rushing up into the house from below so plugging these holes when I come across them has become routine now. Gradually we are sealing up the house from the outside elements. We are also accumulating a considerable quantity of copper pipe as I remove more and more of the old redundant bits.

But I digress.

Returning to our (now missing) bathroom, we are accumulating materials, new wall cladding panels and tiles, ready to go full steam ahead as soon as our plumber returns. However there is a sequence that must be followed. The tiles that will surround our new, enlarged shower cannot by fitted until the shower tray is in. Wall panels must precede the toilet and sink fitting and we have temporarily removed the bathroom radiator ready for its replacement with a heated towel rail but deciding where this fits in the project timeline is less clear. 

Finally the big day arrives. A white van draws up outside and soon our plumber is carrying boxes into the house, assorted pieces of our new bathroom. The 'before' picture above is what confronted him although it hardly does justice to what is happening beyond the window where our first snow of the season is settling on the ground. The forecast is for cold weather, a good excuse to stay inside and move forward with the tiling which will surround our newly fitted shower tray.

But hold on. These are big tiles; more like great rectangular ceramic tea trays. Which begs the question... which way round do they go, horizontal or vertical? And how do we match up the joints - all in line or offset, like house bricks. Important decisions have to be made but eventually we make a start and soon discover that once the first few are done, larger tiles means quicker tiling. Who'd have thought it.

We have an intriguing mix of wall coverings to install in what is quite a small space but the end result will give us a bathroom which is uniquely ours, in contrast to the rest of the house which still reflects the previous owner's taste. As each wall disappears behind a new colour, one we have chosen to give us a smooth modern look, our vision becomes reality. When we have finished, the room will be ready for the return of our plumber, the man who will give us back a working bathroom.

The Great Bathroom Adventure - episode 1

Not for the first time in our lives have we started life in a new home by renovating the bathroom. In fact it has happened too often to count, an indicator perhaps of a certain fetish-ness or there again possibly just a sign that we have a different view on bathrooms from most others. 

Here, by way of example, is what the estate agent captured some months ago when our present house was being marketed for sale. Note particularly the pink cushion, the net curtains, the wood panelling and also the patterned carpet covering the floor. Hmm... none of these is our thing. Out of shot is the tiny shower cubicle (something I have commented on before in this blog and one of three we have in this house) and this being left out of shot may be a hint that the estate agent's views were not dissimilar to ours - best excluded from a marketing perspective.

We are now in the depths of winter, one of the consequences of which is that working outdoors in the few short hours of daylight we have is somewhat limiting, so naturally our thoughts turn inwards. Which brings us back to the bathroom. 

Like many internal house alterations this one starts with something called 'ripping out'. It doesn't take long before the changes become significant, and then more so when we engage the services of a plumber, a professional 'ripper-outer', but also someone who knows what he is doing. 

My role here is to remove the covering up bits to make access easier and we are soon far beyond the point of no return as the shower and bath disappear and this is swiftly followed by the sink, all of which join the toilet in the street outside, ready for transport to the tip.

Soon the bathroom is an empty room and we can see what state the floor and the walls are in and make decisions on what best to cover them with after our plumber has returned to fit some new bathroom bits.

The floor is less than perfect, as it turns out, so we cut a big hole to remove the imperfections, later filling it with a piece of leftover kitchen worktop, just one more item conveniently left behind by the previous owner. There are numerous other imperfections in the floor and the walls but nothing a can of expanding foam and some Polyfilla cannot take care of.

One other item a little further down our ToDo list was to enlarge our bedroom by taking out the en-suite. The estate agent measured this little 'room within a room' internally at 2.6 by 0.8 metres (8ft 6ins by 2ft 7ins), a space big enough to hold a shower cubicle, toilet and a tiny sink only by leaving just enough room for a small human standing upright with arms by their sides. The presence of a plumber in the house bumped this task up the list so that removal of the internals seemed a sensible thing to do. We made the decision to do it, despite this leaving our house almost toilet-less. Fortunately we are not completely devoid of facilities as we began this adventure with no less than three toilets in the house. Not so with the showers, however. When we took occupation there were showers in each of the two bedrooms, another cubicle in the bathroom and the bath also had a shower fitting between the taps. A day's worth of ripping out should have left us with one working shower but as it turned out both en-suites ran off the same water supply so we lost both of them... leaving the house with none. Christmas and New Year just got more exciting.

This is the point where our confession starts. Our house stands on a hill overlooking the marina where our boat is berthed. It is winter so she is high and dry at present, perched on her trailer in the marina car park, but the recently renovated toilet and shower block remains open to berth holders and visitors all year. There are those who live on their boats who will use these facilities all year round, so why not us? The short walk downhill, a luxury shower, then a flog back up the hill gives us a spell of exercise and a breath of fresh air too.

Whilst our plumber takes his winter break abroad we amuse ourselves with ripping out the walls of the now emptied en-suite, the main tools being a large hammer and a crow bar, the main noises being... loud bangs and ripping sounds.

It takes two days of hard work before suddenly our bedroom has expanded. We are delighted by this transformation, despite all the dust we have created settling on every flat surface. This picture shows the before and after.

We are left with some large panels of plasterboard and lengths of timber with large nails sticking out at all angles (most of this is destined for the tip) plus a number of nail and screw holes which need filling. Out comes the Polyfilla again.

Back end of the year

After weeks of dodging rain showers as we tried to focus on jobs around the garden, enduring the frustration of starting one job then rushing inside to avoid getting soaked, suddenly it has dried out. Cloud covers the sky and the wind blows as before but nothing falls on us. Bravely we venture outside, where we stay until late in the day, wearing ourselves out with all the vegetation wrestling. I acquire a battery powered hedge trimmer which I find makes cutting back the shrubs a lot easier and given the mountainous nature of our front garden I decide to call this my cliff edge trimmer. As a result of all our hard work some parts of the garden are even starting to acquire a 'cared for' look they haven't had for many years.

Then suddenly winter arrives. (Nobody saw that coming!) Something we know as the Jetstream decides to do an unusual wriggle, the result of which is to pour cold northerly winds over Britain. Then, since said Jetstream apparently finds this rather pleasant, it maintains this for weeks on end. It makes us reach for our warm underwear, put on thick socks, wrap scarves around our necks, and that  before we even think about going outside. Our garden has turned white with frost and walking about on what was previously sodden grass is suddenly like walking on concrete. Gardening in the conventional sense has become impossible but since there is now an enormous heap of plant matter which was dry enough to be processed in some way, turned into something usable perhaps, this calls for a new strategy.

The next phase of our existence makes use of the limited hours between the sun rising high enough over the hills opposite for its rays to make their way through our windows, giving us the motivation for venturing out, and the early afternoon when the same star disappears in the west for the day and the thermometer creeps below zero again. For me this involves dressing up in multiple layers, over which goes my boiler suit and then a fleecy work jacket, a close fitting hat and my Wellington boots, the latter not so much to keep out water but to keep in the warmth. Thick leather gloves complete this outfit, protection from both the cold and the thorns I am destined to do battle with. Dressed like this I go to war with the plant heap, the aim being to convert it into something of value, maybe something to keep us warm. Hidden in this heap are the branches of long lost trees which once grew in our garden which had previously been thrown over our rear boundary and piled up, threatening the stability of the fence itself. But this is wood, and once the smaller twigs are removed we are left with logs that when cut up and left to dry out, we can burn as fuel to heat the house. The trimmings from our various overgrown garden shrubs meet a different end. These are turned into 'shreddies' by passing them through a garden mincing machine (one of two we now possess) and then spread over our newly cleared areas as a top dressing. And the best part of all this activity is that it keeps me warm in the biting cold outside, a warmth that lasts all day.

The bitter cold does bring something with it, of course - sunshine. Solstice is only days away but just before 10am each day the sun pops up over the hill opposite and blasts down from a cloudless sky all day. It has little effect on the temperature outside but in our south facing conservatory, surrounded on all sides by glass, the temperature rises steadily until it becomes warmer in there than in the house itself. This is an unexpected bonus for us. We can only imagine how hot this is going to become in the summer months. Perhaps a small sauna is appropriate.

The winter solstice arrives. From now onwards the days get longer, starting with sunset happening later each day. At 47 minutes past 9 pm Greenwich Mean Time on 21st December 2022, at this precise moment in the day, the tilt in the earth's axis reverses so that the length of each day grows. Thank goodness for this wobble, without which life as we know it would not exist.

One person who must know all about this is Santa Claus but despite this he comes early, with flashing lights from the fire engine which accompanies him as he rides past our house and several blasts from the siren as we wave at him. We are honoured to be blessed with his visit and very excited to see him.

House plans

There are a couple of expressions people might use after moving home and looking around the house properly for the first time. We might say we want to 'make it ours' or alternatively we might want to 'put our mark on it'. Either of these expressions could mean almost anything from putting your own pictures up on the wall, new lamp shades, or entire decor changes in every room but in essence what we mean is that what was to the taste of previous owners is not to ours. Just putting in our own furniture, replacing what has been taken away, doesn't quite give us what we want so something more fundamental has to change to meet our desires... and this requires making plans.

In the Grand Designs TV programme the format at this point is for the presenter to pour doubt upon the ideas some rather embarrassed family has for a barren plot of land they have acquired and to raise his eyebrows when told their proposed budget. 'How much! And how long do you expect this to take?' Of course on TV by the end of the show it is all smiles and happiness as we are shown around the colossus of a house with its custom built staircase and vast areas of glass looking out into a perfectly landscaped garden, evidence that the project has turned out well after all and is fully in keeping with the owners' original plans (although maybe somewhat over the original budget).

So now to reality. We are not building anything from scratch but there is, nevertheless, much that we would wish to change about the house we have just bought and moved into, probably going far beyond 'putting a mark on it' if the truth is to be told. Take the kitchen, for instance. It needs more worktop space and it would also be nice to have cupboards with shelves that are within arm's reach and not nudging the ceiling and needing steps to reach them. The gas cooker might look ok but it is far from perfect. The oven doesn't cook pizza properly, pies need defrosting first to have any chance of cooking and the grill is pretty hopeless. Then there's that tap over the sink that the kettle won't fit under - whatever were they thinking - and the kitchen power points all seem to be in the wrong place. The lack of an extractor fan also means that as soon as cooking starts the whole house knows what is coming by the smell.

Moving on to the bathroom, the tiny shower cubicle gave me claustrophobia as I bumped my elbows on the sides and it was squeezed into a small room which already has a bath with a shower attachment. The shower screen was the first thing to be ripped out (we have another en suite shower in the house that we can use). We have always found a spacious walk-in shower ticks most of our boxes and we have lived in a house without a bath for the last 10 years.

Fortunately since this is not the first time in our lives we have moved house and redesigned rooms to 'make them ours' I am equipped with the technology to produce scaled plans that I can view in 3D so we can visualise our ideas. Shown here is bathroom version 4, one that will involve a toilet relocation and a new shower tray and screen. The electric power-shower has gone, replaced by one fed with both hot and cold water, which seems to make more sense to us.

Whilst I can manage the destructive bits, stripping the walls and ceiling, for the plumbing side of this project and particularly in relation to the toilet, what we need now is a nice plumber to install and connect up all the difficult bits leaving me to redecorate afterwards. The polystyrene tiles have come off the ceiling (something that revealed a long crack in the plasterboard above) and we now have some nice shiny pvc panels up there. Our favourite plumber is lined up to do the rest.

These two rooms, kitchen and bathroom, are the priority for us although we are conscious of wanting to do so much more to the house to really make it ours, ultimately to change the decor in every room, a massive undertaking perhaps, but we're talking about longer term plans here, no rush. 

Meanwhile there are other things that will soon start going on outside the house, big changes that will keep us warm for years to come. Insulation all around, wrapping the house up in a blanket to keep us cosy.

Bramble extraction [✓]

The longest and most challenging of the tasks on our ToDo list is finally ticked. Job done! That is not to say that there is no single piece of bramble left on our land - far from it. But we have now clambered over every inch, gone into every corner, fought our way along each boundary fence and dived down beneath each clump of dense, overgrown plant life to find and cut off those stems as close to the ground as possible. Once having pulled those long strands out from their tangled home we have created a massive pile of vegetation in the rear garden which one day, perhaps, when it has dried out, we will set fire to. The brambles will regrow, we know this as the roots are still in the ground, but at least we'll be ready for them when they do. 

It has been hard work, very physical, and quite satisfying to get as far as we have. Sadly though such a thorough exploration of the garden has revealed something else, something we did not expect and which we find quite offensive. 

Whoever had responsibility for this garden in the past seemed to think it appropriate to throw things away, to dump stuff there, mostly amongst the denser growths of vegetation so that it would be hidden in the shrubbery or the long grass. The bramble invasion ensured that once lost from sight these items stayed that way and would still be hidden today had we not bought the house. The latest discovery, buried beneath the grass, is another Jewson's bag, a bulky sack used to deliver sand or gravel to your home. These things are made to last, a tough nylon mesh with four handles for lifting the immense weight as it is craned off the lorry. They are indestructible by any normal standard and will certainly not biodegrade by being buried in the soil. However this is the third bag we have pulled from the ground since we moved in a month ago, along with plastic bags, glass bottles, lumps of iron fencing, plasterboard, some sheets of corrugated asbestos, broken flower pots and a host of other things. One of the Jewson's bags was full of tiny pieces of broken glass, too heavy to move until some of it was shoveled out. This goes way beyond a lack of care for the garden. It is as if someone has deliberately thrown these items away, guiltily hiding them perhaps, instead of disposing of them properly.

On the positive side, during all our outdoor work, carried out in between the rain showers, we have had a small companion.

He will fly down almost as soon as we start work somewhere and stare at us from almost beneath our feet, hopping about looking for any insects or worms to feed on. He is a robin, but one with almost no fear of humans. We call him Rob and rather obligingly he has let me take his picture. He's a real charmer.

Mahonia

Mahonia is a large genus of woody evergreen shrubs named by British botanist Thomas Nuttall to honour Bernard McMahon, a colonial nurseryman from Philadelphia who was Thomas Jefferson's gardening mentor. It is also one of the many gifts left to us by the previous owners of our new house.

Like others in the Berberidaceae order this plant has shiny leaves which are spiky, rather like holly, and we have several massive bushes in our garden which have not been pruned or cut back for many years. Pruning them, however, means braving not just the spikyness of their leaves but also another invader which hides itself in an impossible-to-reach spot amongst the cluster of stems at ground level. The green stems from this plant rise up within the bush until they reach the daylight nearly three metres above then continue growing to drape themselves downwards around those spiky leaves until eventually they reach the ground again. Here they grow into the long uncut grass surrounding the tree where sooner or later they will decide it is time to send out new roots into the soil. By this time their spiky stems have grown to some six or seven metres. No amount of pulling on the exposed stems will break them; they are strong. Only by cutting off the stems from within the bush can they be removed, torn away with with every ounce of strength as each spike tries to hold on for its life. But to do this you must get inside the bush, braving those spiky mahonia leaves again. I am, of course, referring to bramble, often named after its fruit, the blackberry.

Suitably protected by my boiler suit, with thick leather gloves tightly fastened on each hand and armed with some long handled loppers I attack the shrub from the outside first, nipping off each cluster of leaves until I can see deeper in to where the bramble is hiding. I am ruthless, this is not an exercise in prettiness. The aim here is to reduce the whole thing to a size which enables us to walk around this part of the garden.

I soon notice, however, something quite surprising. The flesh inside a mahonia branch is bright yellow, thicker stems also having an internal ring of white with more yellow inside that. This takes me by surprise as I apologise to the plant for any harm I might be causing. Then eventually I can see the bramble stems deep inside rising from the ground and I push the loppers in to cut them off as close as possible to the ground.

I have nothing personal against the bramble (I would be the first to eat jam made from its fruit) but we have just bought a house with a garden completely overrun by this plant, to such an extent that normal gardening cannot even begin until the long trailing stems are cut out. By their nature the strength of those stems and the roots that feed them is quite remarkable, impressively so. Human strength alone will not break them. Instead each stem must be traced across the ground or through whatever plant it has invaded until it disappears into the soil where it can be cut so that the whole stem can then be ripped free. Inevitably during the process of doing this the spikes will find your flesh, usually the wrists, but eyes and ears are equally vulnerable unless great care is taken. So far we have filled our trailer three times with bramble stems, each time jumping on the load to squash it flat before taking it to the local tip. Then, realising the futility of wasting fuel by driving, we began to pile the material up in the garden, awaiting the next dry spell when we will have a massive bonfire.

Changing the subject a little...I believe I may have mentioned before the 'stuff' we have been (un)fortunate enough to have purchased along with our new house. The quantity of garden tools alone, particularly small trowels and forks stashed in both sheds, in the greenhouse, or just lying about in the garden, is hard to comprehend. Someone who once lived here clearly had a fetish about nails and screws too. These come in all sizes and are invariably in little packets, carefully wrapped then placed in larger bags or boxes or rusted tins. The space beneath the house (we call this the understory although this normally refers to the area beneath a woodland tree canopy) is the best place to find screws although on each visit down there something else is discovered. There was a considerable collection of long playing records, most of which date back to the 1960s and were welcomed in our local charity shop, an elderly knitting machine, a wooden table and two benches lay dismantled alongside a box of hinges and a bagged up gazebo. It is clear from the layer of dust that none of these items have been touched for years; they were forgotten long before the last owner chose to forget to take them away when she moved out.

A tasteful cluster of tiny drawers was fixed to the wall high up in a kitchen cupboard, not the sort of place where one might expect to keep a ragged assortment of screws, small electrical bits, hooks, tiny nuts and bolts, a random collection of washers, assorted nails, plastic wall plugs and 11p in coin (that is if you ignore the Belgian francs). The sheer randomness of each little drawer's contents speaks volumes about the mind of the person who put together this collection, a level of disorderliness to which I can only aspire. Indeed it has made me recognise one aspect of my own make up which results in my recoiling in horror when faced with having to deal with something like this, casting over 90% of what is before me into the rubbish bin. Each item was clearly manufactured with a particular purpose in mind, a destination which it should have shared with others of its kind or indeed a role which it might have uniquely held for many years. All that is now lost.

But I have gone on long enough here about the discoveries in and around our new home and since for some days rain has discouraged further play out in the wilder areas of our garden we now indulge in some indoor relaxation by planning how we might change the inside spaces to suit our tastes. Lots of thinking and months of decorating lie ahead.

Moving in and on

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.

Oh, and this is what we missed underfoot.

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.