Month: February 2021

Don’t Stop Moving

by mkingdon, posted in house move, Walt Disney World

After all these months of pain, stress, worry, frustration, heartburn and tedious moaning on my blog, we were fnally scheduled to move last Friday…………….and it didn’t fecking happen.

Yep, we have seldom suffered a week so stressful, frustrating and infuriating. All of the issues sat with our buyer’s buyer, which made things harder as we were always just getting Chinese whispers via our estate agent. The story seemed to change with every update, and we went several days with seemingly no communication at all coming from what appears to be the shittest legal conveyancing firm on the planet. For most of the week, it was said that the delay/lack of confirmation was all down to the lender and whether they could release the funds in time. Now, looking back, I would struggle to articulate all that happened and the circumstances which led to us still being sat in our old house.

As we approached the middle of the week we still didn’t know whether we were moving on Friday. We assumed not, but nobody could get, so it appeared, a definitive answer from the buyer at the bottom of our chain.

At some point in the week, I forget when exactly, our estate agent rang with the first proper update. It turned out that when the 26th of February was proposed and everyone said they were ready, the first time buyer at the bottom declared that they were without confirming that with either their estate agent or solicitor who, maybe, could have told them that they were not ready. So naïve buyers, with bobbins estate agents and solicitors, made for a perfect storm of incompetence and ultimately a disappointment.

If anyone still cares, it took until Wednesday for them to share what the actual issue was. Let me regale you with the inane triviality of what has delayed four house moves.

The house being sold by our buyer apparently had a clause in the lease that said that the ground rent can be renegotiated every 25 years for the first 100 years. It’s a relatively new house so that could happen four times in total. The lender wanted an indemnity policy from the seller, (our buyer) to cover the “risk” that the ground rent could be raised by such an amount that the buyer would then not be able to afford to repay their mortgage. As unlikely a scenario as that may be, why was this not addressed in all the weeks and months that we have all been sat waiting for legal folks to do legal things? When it was raised, it was resolved in less than 24 hours. How we laughed.

So with that done, on Thursday, I think, we had a call from our solicitor telling us that our buyer’s solicitor had contacted her to say everything was now in place. That double proactivity astounded me. Even now just a few days later I can’t really make sense of the sequence of events if I am honest. Life is so busy at the minute my arse and elbow are unacquainted, but at some point, on Thursday or Friday, all parts of the chain agreed that the 5th of March was the new date. It takes 5 days for lenders to send money apparently so that was the soonest safest date to choose. It’s funny how I can send money immediately to anyone just using my iPhone but there you go.

It has been one of the most unpleasant and stressful weeks we have ever known. That will sound over dramatic and even now looking back on it, I wonder how we felt like that, but buried deep in the eye of the storm, it felt like the world was ending.

Still, at least that delayed broadband order I moaned about last week won’t matter as by the time we get in that should all be working. Also, months ago we ordered a new sofa for the lounge thinking that we’d be in the new house for ages before it was ready on the 8th of March. So this new date timed perfectly to have that delivered just a couple of days after we moved in. That was of course until we had a call from the furniture place on Friday, a few hours after getting our new date, saying that our new sofa was delayed till the end of March, because of Brexit. If you follow me on Twitter you may have got a hint that I have some reservations about the sunlit uplands of Brexit, so this piece of news delighted me more than Farage’s glee at another dinghy being sighted off the English coast.

We have lots of luck, but most of it is bad.

With my head spinning from all of the above, plus a really busy/stressful time at work for both Louise and me, somehow, I managed to squeeze in a couple of thoughts about our holiday. It’s a big deal to me at all times so this won’t be too shocking. I think it was last week that the incompetent haystack in Number 10 made some announcements about lifting restrictions that would be data-driven not date driven. He then followed that sentence by announcing a load of dates that everyone has now taken as gospel.

Somewhere in that mess of information was a date of June 21st when “everything goes back to normal” and all restrictions are lifted. This is great of course, were it to happen. However, even if the UK alone could determine that international travel would start again then, that is sadly a little late for us, with our June 14th departure date. Add to that, Disney saying that masks will be needed for all of 2021 and that is the death knell for our trip I think. Masks would be tough for us all in the June heat, but Freddie at three years old, would not understand why he needed one and the battle to have him wear one would very likely be a major issue on the whole trip.

So I’m doing nothing just yet, mainly as flight prices aren’t available for the dates in 2022 I might want, but I have resigned myself to having to pick up and move the whole thing again, or if that proves too hard just cancel and book again when the time is right. Of course, there could be some miracle where the US keeps doing vaccines at 2.5m a day (yep, that was yesterday’s figure) and things get so much better that Disney decides they can lift mask-wearing…..and we may be able to go later in summer/autumn, but I have very low to no hopes of that happening if I am honest.

Let us hope that our house move finally happening, spring starting to be visible on the horizon and the continued success of the vaccination programme all signal a change in our lives and fortunes and a return to some form of normality so that I can once again spend every penny of our disposable income on holidays.

If nothing else it may make your Sundays a little more bearable. Having been through this whole moving thing the obvious and only advice I can offer is, don’t.

Till the next time……

I Fought The Law…

by mkingdon, posted in house move

A long time ago, in a sixth form college far, far away (it’s not, it is actually visible from our bedroom window, but I wanted to shoehorn the Star Wars thing in) a young man briefly toyed with the idea of going to University to study law. A series of unexpected events, involving a week’s work experience in a bank, ending with a job offer and A levels then being abandoned for the lure of £70 a week to fund his ambitions to be a pop star saw that stellar legal career thwarted before it began.

If only I had known the very low bar (pun intended) that seems to be required to practice law, particularly conveyancing (apologies to my conveyancing solicitor reader) I surely could have breezed through life without stress or pressure.

Why am I tarring all such professionals with the same brush? Well, here we sit mere hours now from the day on which we should move house and we STILL don’t know for sure that it is happening. Our buyer’s buyer at the foot of our mercifully short chain is as yet not able to commit to that date. Why you ask? Well, yes I asked the same question. It would appear that when the 26th was suggested and accepted by all parties, the solicitor acting for our buyer’s buyer “forgot” to contact their lender to confirm the date on which their funds would be needed.

This only came to light when I proactively contacted all estate agents and solicitors in the chain that I had details for, checking that everyone was still OK for the 26th. A day or so later this brought forward an email from my solicitor, telling me the news that the start of our chain could not yet commit.

As they are a first-time buyer using a complicated mortgage where relatives donate their savings or some such thing, the release of funds is a complex affair that requires multiple days of complex cyphers and puzzles, a bit like the Da Vince Code but without Tom Hanks, and despite us discovering this cock-up on Tuesday of last week we have still not had confirmation that all will be well for this coming Friday.

We have been assured that Barclays, the lender in question, is expected to confirm the release of funds can be undertaken in time for the 26th on Monday, but still, this has left us with yet another weekend of uncertainty and stress, which makes a nice change.

So despite all the attempts to derail this move, all we can do is continue to pack and pack and pack endlessly, without it seems, any real progress to be seen.

Then, to top off my week, on Friday, our removal man rang me to ask if it was OK if he got to us around lunchtime on Friday as he has had another enquiry for a move on Thursday that he may need to finish off on Friday morning. I shall just let you know that he is turning up at our house at 8.30am on Friday as booked and planned. Sigh…..

I suppose it is months of nonsense like this that leads to me struggling to believe that we will ever live in this house. The thought of moving into the new place was once a source of a modicum of excitement and anticipation and day by day it just becomes a source of worry, stress and angst.

Oh, and….

Knowing that broadband is essential for us workers from home, I ordered it with plenty of time to have it work on the day we move in. A few days later, they contacted me via email with a query about the existing lines in the house. I contacted the seller and answered that on the same day. Having then seen four days go by and my order status not change, I called them. Indeed, nothing had been progressed and now, we won’t have broadband for about four days after we move in. I deliberately chose PlusNet as I spotted the previous owner used them and this should make the transition nice and easy, especially with the house being a bit out in the country. It seems I can do no right. I am raging about this, but apparently, nothing can be done and I sit impotently seething about that as well.

The ordering of new broadband and a TV package for the new place had allowed me last week to finally tell Virgin Media where to stick their temperamental broadband and TV package, uncompetitive prices and even worse customer service where you are not allowed to talk to a human.

Fittingly, it took me five, yes five hours to get to talk to a person and cancel the service. It isn’t actually available at our new house so it saved them the trouble of trying to persuade me to take them with us. I did point out that spending five hours on hold, getting cut off a couple of times and generally suffering this crap for the last few years was not the best way to encourage customer retention. I have to post their kit back to them when we’ve moved. I may do a huge dump in the box.

In an attempt to insert some crumb of house move positivity into this diatribe, Rebecca and Tom picked up their keys on Tuesday. They have already made great progress on the work that needs doing before they can move in but it is great to see them finally over the line. It has gone some way to dispelling the myth that house moves no longer happen and people just stay in a constant state of purgatory until everyone in the chain dies. Decorating has already happened, windows and doors are due to be fitted in the coming days and hopefully within a week or so they will be in and starting to get settled.

So next week I have three days off work because we might be moving house and there are things to do. Then again, we might not, but clearly, I just have to accept this as part of the game. If we are lucky and people fancy doing something to make it happen, the next blog you read will be from our new house. I won’t have broadband of course, so it’ll be some brief badly formatted thing done on my phone. I think I have said this most weeks since the summer (yes, this all started in the summer) but moving house should not be this difficult. The results are in….

Moving House 1 – Overweight Northern Blogger 0

Till the next time…..

It’s A Date!

by mkingdon, posted in house move

Thankfully for you dear reader, I will need to be brief this week as I have things to do.

I owe you an update on our move of course after all the moaning of the last few weeks and months. The week started in a maelstrom of frustration and stress and I was almost immediately onto my solicitor in yet another attempt to get things moving, literally.

I can’t remember the play by play breakdown of how things happened, but a few robust conversations were had followed by me pestering anybody even close to your chain. The two remaining queries that were awaited by our solicitor, remained as just that as we careered into Wednesday, and my conversations in those few days were along the lines of, WTF is it that is so hard about these two things that we sit here, six weeks after they were first raised, still waiting.

My solicitor could not understand that either. At one point I even got her on the phone, and despite my shock at that turn of events, I did manage to make that call useful by understanding a little more about what she was waiting for. My questioning was along the lines of….

“You and my seller’s solicitor do this all day everyday. Why are these two things proving beyond you?”

She assured me they were standard queries with what she called standard remedies and it just needed the other side to do something.

With that knowledge and a new level of frustration in hand, I went to our seller’s estate agent again, and began a conversation with the seller, urging him to kick his legal folks up the arse. It all came down to a missing page of the deeds (the house was originally built in the 1700’s so this was not a shock) and the seller needed to provide one more indemnity policy to protect us from whatever might be on that one page.

As a final testament to solicitor inertia and with all due respect to any conveyancing solicitor’s reading this (I know there may be at least one, hi Rhian!) I got a message back from the seller, via their estate agent along the lines of…

“I have seen a new policy from my solicitor. They haven’t told me what it is for or why it is needed, but I have accepted the costs and signed it for the sake of our collective sanity”.

How can I know what the policy was for and he not? It is his house!!

So with my opinion of solicitors damaged a little more, I told myself that I would give my solicitor till about 4.30 that day before calling her to see if she had received this final piece of the jigsaw. At around 4.10 an unknown number rang me on the mobile. The fact that we are six months into this move and my solicitor’s number is unknown to me, says all that needs to be said about the service we have received I think.

She was calling me to let me know that she now had all she needed and we would now be able to aim for a moving date of the 26th of February. This was a date already suggested to us by our very unimpressed buyer a few days earlier in a vain attempt to hurry us along. We needed no hurrying, just a competent legal team.

So there followed several minutes of relief, joy, and delight that we had saved our chain and preserved the chances of us ever moving into this bloody house. Shortly afterwards, the sheer scale of the work still required to get us ready to do so dawned and the stress returned.

It at least allowed me to move onto a load of tasks that I had been gagging to get done. The essentials such as broadband and a TV package needed ordering. The former being absolutely crucial with Emily and I working from home. So those were done along with quite a lot of address changing and informing utility companies of our move. With a following wind, we may actually have broadband in place by the time we get there.

So the long journey to a moving date is seemingly complete. Let’s hope we do not suffer in the same way as Rebecca and Tom, who had their moving date missed again on Friday, due to, you’ll never guess, their solicitor forgetting to do something! They are now lined up for next Wednesday.

I now need to leave you to survey the catastrophic state of our house and find some more things to put into boxes. This will be interspersed with me staring at large pieces of furniture and stressing about how on earth it will get transported to the new place. It’s how we roll these days.

Till the next time……

Conveying Stress

by mkingdon, posted in house move, Walt Disney World

I am undertaking some rest and recuperation this weekend. For the past few weeks, every weekend has been a whirl of packing and sorting stuff out, but I have decided, no, have been forced, to not do that this week, as to be frank, I’m bloody knackered.

No doubt that is a build-up of month’s of angst and stress but last week especially was a busy one. My own job was particularly hectic, but I was also trying my hand at some DIY conveyancing.

Here is a representation of last week, with me being portrayed by somebody with hair and a normal BMI.

As our solicitor, and as I discovered, our seller’s too, seemed disinclined to have a go at the stuff they are qualified in and paid well for, things were taken into my own hands. I can’t recount the full set of events, but it started with a strongly worded email to all concerned parties on Monday (nobody answers their phone or calls back) and it ended with myself and the seller, via their estate agent, directly discussing what was outstanding and the best way forward.

In a nutshell, there are about six outstanding queries on our purchase, mostly relating to the quirky and often changed nature of the house and all its conversions and extensions over the years. The solicitors involved were playing a never-ending game of email tennis, which when I finally wrestled a copy of the email chain from my solicitor, seemed to contain lots of referring each other to other emails dated blah, blah, blah and not a great deal of effort to actually get any of the issues addressed.

So I took it upon myself to reach out to the seller and ask him to try to get his solicitor to do something….anything…..much as I was trying to do with mine. Via their estate agent, an email exchange happened, and rightly or wrongly I shared with him the outstanding issues and asked if he could help get this sale done so he can pocket all of our money.

To his credit, he quickly agreed to cover any outstanding bits of paperwork that could not be provided with an indemnity policy, much as we have done to our buyer for works done to our house that we have no paperwork for and gave his solicitor a kick up the arse. Last I heard late on Thursday was that he had approved the draft policy provided to him and told them to get on with it. I am led to believe that this is now with our solicitor but of course, any form of proactive update from them is clearly not in the package I am paying for, and I shall have to wait until my third email chaser next week to get a half-formed update. There was no point in trying to get any such update on Friday as she has long since made it clear that Fridays are a day when she has more important stuff to do.

So I do not know if this covers all outstanding queries but it will sort the majority. The coming few days may see my solicitor do something other than ignoring my calls and emails.

I think the stress and frustration of all that hit me on Saturday morning when my body untensed after such a busy week, both in the job for which I get paid and the one I am doing despite paying someone else to do, so I woke feeling like rubbish. I declared the weekend a write off and that I wouldn’t be doing anything of any note.

Indeed, the day’s only achievements were eating three-quarters of a pack of Rich Tea and having two poos. A red-letter day indeed. The evening, as nearly all of them are now, was spent binge-watching something. Our current set of things on the go are –

Servant (on Apple TV)

The entire Marvel film back catalogue on Disney + (to be fair we only started that journey last week by watching Captain America, so I don’t know how committed we are to that).

Wandavision

Celebrity Game Face

The latter is our newest form of vegetation and is a new discovery tucked away on the channel E. We seldom watch this channel as it normally features too many Kardashians or reality shows about WWE wrestlers that we don’t know. However, we stumbled upon Kevin Hart’s Celebrity Game Face. It’s silly, pointless and at times hilarious and just what you need when you’ve been trying to move house for six months and still don’t have a clue when it might happen. Give it a go if you want to turn your brain off and have a chuckle.

Of course, Rebecca and Tom’s move did not happen last week as they were promised. Their seller had the nerve to find himself in hospital, which rendered him unable to sign things and so their date has been put back to next Friday. It’s almost as if moving house is an absolute horror show that you should never, ever do.

Someone commented last week that I didn’t even mention our holiday. It’s a sign of how full my mind is of houses, solicitor inertia and other such bollocks and I know the entire UK Disney community uses this blog as some sort of bell-wether or canary in the coal mine for their entire planning strategy, so here’s my current take.

My current forecast of the chances of us being in WDW in June is slim to none. I can’t back that up with any firm stats or evidence and as such I have been invited to take up a position in cabinet, but it’s just a feeling. Now, I know that my overall mood right now is one of stress and frustration, so I may not be in the best place to make that judgement, but it just feels too soon….again.

Being so tired and emotional I also feel that even if borders are open, the thought of wearing masks, especially for Freddie, also appears to be dragging me down a bit. Not that we will ever be back to the normal we thought we had pre-Covid, but I think it will be Summer 2022 before things like social distancing and masks have a chance of being removed by the risk-averse Disney parks.

As I said, I’m tired and emotional. For that reason, I am properly missing our holidays right now. The juxtaposition of seeing my trio of vloggers in the WDW parks whilst we have to stay in our houses wrapped in cling film isn’t helping.

Who knows. By the spring, international travel may be allowed with a vaccine or a negative test and we may be able to make the best of the experience despite the masks and at least get some sun, good food and a change of scenery in mid-June. If we can’t, then I guess the next obvious set of dates would be our usual very late August time of year, but I have to say, sacking it all off and waiting for 2022 is also a very real consideration. There are only so many times you can book one holiday.

So there you go. A post where you can almost see my tiredness and stress hanging off every word. Luckily, everything that is contributing to that will continue at a pace for a while so buckle yourselves in for the next few weeks. How frequently I will update you on the poo count is, at this stage, unknown.

Till the next time……