Confusion and children.

Part five and three quarters. Still in England.

Ummmm…what’s happened? Where am I???? Oh yeah, trying to buy a house. I finally got to something like the bottom of the silly buggers regarding the potential sale of the potential house (I REALLY don’t want to jinx this one). It seems our German Gentleman wishes to have a final holiday in the house which he built but never really got around to using. Ok, fair enough, if I’m getting a bargain then I can concede this. Apart from anything else I have a daughter to despatch to the African subcontinent in late July, and I want to be ABSOLUTELY  and UNEQUIVOCALLY sure she gets on the right bloody plane!!! She is in possession of certain assets which seem to have a certain effect on gentlemen of the non homosexual persuasion, this means that she frequently cannot get a sensible or coherent answer out of them (‘which gate does my flight leave from?’… ‘Just follow me… into this cleaning locker where I’ve stashed a bottle of vodka…’). So, Hans wishes to say a fond farewell to his house, which I can totally understand. What I’m struggling with is the fact that, although the house is advertised as ‘sold fully furnished’, Hans will not be in a position to remove his belongings until late September. Now when I did the viewing, I wouldn’t have described the place as cluttered. I begin to wonder if there is a letting scheduled for August….. I am also getting a little irritable. I finally managed to get hold of my solicitor, who was, once again, in court. (what sort of clients does he have??? I’d fondly imagined his books were filled with the likes of my mother, aged, infirm, demanding and irascible, but unlikely to be up before ‘yer honour’ unless they had swung for an immigrant with a well aimed walking stick… in which case a plea of raging dementia would be a cert). Said solicitor shared my opinion that the vendor is somewhat taking the piss. I had made what I hoped was a helpful suggestion, via the estate agent, that anything the vendor wished to store I was happy to keep in the excellently appointed garage and which he could collect at his convenience, I am even willing to give them a key! The fact is, I just bloody want to get on with it!!! I pointed out (rather stridently perhaps) that my older daughter is due to give birth in late September. This will be my first grandchild (the dog, horse and rabbits don’t count). It is not unreasonable to expect that my time will be fully occupied from the moment she goes into labour until the child goes to boarding school (although I admit I was planning to do a runner a little earlier). With this in mind, and the fact that babies are notoriously erratic (who am I kidding, my daughter is 25 and she’s still bloody erratic!!!) I really really want to have everything done and dusted well before the middle of September. I am shamelessly using this as a lever to prise the German Gentleman out asap. It seems (according to the estate agent, who can be even more fanciful and loquacious than me) that GG is planning an extended trip to Canada with his spouse to ‘celebrate their long marriage’. Uh oh…. If that was me, I’d be planning a trip to the wide open spaces because they offer Sooooo many opportunities for hiding a body, not because the prospect of an extended road trip with the ball and chain set my world on fire, but then I am bitter and twisted. (apologies to ‘Himself’, I was referring to an earlier mishap).

Anyhow, I thought that if I got a list of the house contents which come with the sale, then I would be able to say ‘hey, there’s just a couple of boxes, I can store them, no problem’. This appears to be the case. All the big stuff is included in the sale, probably because it would be too expensive to ship it to Germany. I didn’t see too many signs of priceless antiques, but futons feature heavily. I did wonder, on seeing the list (German efficiency!) how many of us would be able to mentally go through a house and list the contents. I think I could manage the big stuff, how many beds etc, but I would struggle with how many occasional tables and portable lamps. As for Himself (who brought it up), I doubt he would get far past ‘a considerable amount of machinery’….he could probably detail every nut and bolt, down to the year of manufacture… ‘and some brown stuff (the rest of the furniture).

Believe it or not, I have actually got to the deposit stage. That was bloody scary!!! An electronic transfer of a hefty sum (only four figures, but still….) into the agent’s account, accompanied by a rather stern email from me. I assume it’s turned up in the expected place, I did get a reply to my mail to the agent…. There is still an inner Luddite who wants to hand it over in unequivocal notes and watch as it is counted….. (This is NOT the same thing as Shorty’s brown paper bag proposal!!!).

There is a part of me that  remains unconvinced. It will either go tits up (again) or the surveyor will discover it was built on a mineshaft, or……. So… I’m still obsessively checking the property sites online. There are quite a few new arrivals. Notably a mill with additional guest house, which is on for auction. I remember stopping by this property with Himself so he could check out the millwheel (bloody engineers!). At the time I drooled over the house, but had no aspirations whatsoever, as I knew I was beneath it’s station. I guess it’s a repossession, because it’s now listed at a price I can mentally assimilate. There are no pictures of the inside, so no interiors porn for me, although under the circumstances it might smack of necrophilia. Mercifully an inspection of pictures of the assorted roofs put me off, as Himself is doing battle with a pervasive and fountain like leak at the moment. I got a bit worried when I couldn’t raise him on the phone the other day. I had visions of him stuck on the parapet with the wind carrying the ladder away, or clutching his chest as his mobile slithered down the gutter…….

I hope that nothing amazing turns up while I’m embroiled with this German place. I don’t want to have wasted all this time, effort and money, only to see the house I have always dreamed of come on the market just as I have completed…..Whatever way you look at  it, sods law will apply. Either I will actually buy this place, only to see my dream house online the following week, or something dreadful will happen with this one and I will slink away with my tail between my legs again……