It’s A Date!

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……