www.leoskelly.co.uk

Moving house is stressful. It’s also tiring, and when you’re in the last few days in your house, there’s the matter of cancelling/moving/amending your address & account details with around 40 different companies. Yesterday, I contacted our house insurance company in order to cancel our policy. As one might expect these days, I ended up speaking to a call centre in India…an event which only added to the stress of moving, as I couldn’t understand half of what the customer service ‘manager’ was saying, nor could he understand what I was saying.

At one stage during the telephone call, I had to chuckle. We’re moving in with my Mum-in-law for a short period until such time that the legals on our new house have been done and dusted. Dorothy’s house is an old house, built around 1887, and over time, it’s suffered war damage, as well as damp, flooding and fire (an external garage), and understandably, this is seen as a greater insurance risk to house contents whilst we’re living there in transit. ‘Nick’ from the Indian call centre asked me if the house had suffered any “heew”, so I asked him to repeat this…still couldn’t understand what he was asking, and I asked him to repeat it twice more….but I still couldn’t understand what he was asking. And then he spelt it….

H for hotel
E for echo
A for alpha
WE for wictor
E for echo

I asked him if he was saying ‘hee-we’…and he responded by saying it again, and spelling it again, including the ‘we for wictor’. Then the penny dropped. He wanted to know if the house had suffered any movement or ‘heave’ (as in ‘we for wictor’). How Ywonne and I laughed.

Well, one month on from putting in an offer on a house, we withdrew our offer on Monday last. Lots of legal wranglings – unforeseen as the estate agent had advertised the property as ‘freehold’ instead of ‘leasehold’ – together with absolutely no progression of the purchase in almost a month, provided us with sufficient time to evaluate whether or not we were doing the right thing. Truth be known, we both felt as though a weight had been lifted off our shoulders when we made the withdrawal, so it was obviously the right thing to do.

This weekend, we’re off to view another 4 houses. Fingers crossed.

In September 2007, we put our house up for sale. Twenty one months whizzed by, and having reduced it in price 3 times, we couldn’t understand why it hadn’t sold, so two months before little Katrina was due (last June), we took it off. In January just gone, we decided to put it back on again – this time with a different estate agent & with a different set of photos. In line with the rest of the market, we reduced it in price again – overall by £45,000 (it hurts me to even type that!), but the new price brought much needed interest in the property.

Two weeks ago, we returned from a holiday in Centerparcs (sniff…fresh air!) and were absolutely delighted to receive a letter confirming Seán’s acceptance into a primary school in Aughton, West Lancs, starting next September 2010. The following day, we had a vewing and just like any other, we presented the house as best we could, and hoped for further interest. It came 10 days ago with a request for a second viewing – the first second viewing we’d had – and we were both excited and nervous, but trying not to get too excited. It went well, and the following day, we had an offer, which we accepted! Whoop-dee-whoop! The pressure was on…we had to find a house for ourselves.

Last Sunday, we went to view a property that we’d previously viewed in January, and having considered all aspects of the buy, we made an offer and it was accepted – hooray!! It’s amazing what can happen in such a short space of time. Today, we dropped into our estate agent and made all of the final preparations  signatures, etc. and we expect that the whole thing will be through – done and dusted – by mid-May…actually, it may even be a little earlier, who knows.

It’s DAMN EXPENSIVE to move house…£7K in our case, but hey-ho, it’s what we want. I don’t think I realised just how expensive these things really are, and it’s funny when I think back about how we bought our current house – our first house; there were no estate agents involved and we kinda went into it with our eyes half shut. It was almost fun! So here we are with about 6-8 weeks left in our lovely little house, and this morning, I went outside to find that the word ‘SOLD’ had been added to the ‘For Sale’ sign by the pixies during the night – I love those pixies.

I hope that the new owners will be as happy in the house as we’ve been.

Wish us luck.

Leo. x