New House

I've been a bit quiet (ok a lot quiet) on here over the past few months. My excuse is that we've just bought a house so I think that was taking up a lot of mental energy. I gotta say the way house purchases are carried out here in the UK leaves a lot to be desired. Not that I've ever bought a house anywhere else, but man I just can't imagine it can be this bad everywhere. The weird thing is with almost every other purchase you make, a pair of jeans, a washing machine, or any service that is provided to you, there seem to be all these consumer laws designed to protect you, the purchaser. If the jeans are the wrong size you can take them back no worries, if the washing machine breaks, it'll be fixed, if you go to a restaurant you are probably not going to get sick. And yet a house, which costs hundreds of times more, there are no protections whatsoever. It feels like everyone just wants a piece of you (or rather a piece of your money), but if anything goes wrong you are the only one who is liable. And if there turns out to be something wrong with the house, too bad! It's so weird that the biggest purchase of your life has zero protection around it. And don't even get me started on stamp duty.

The last week before completion was pretty stressful because at that point you have signed the contracts and are legally bound to complete the sale on the date given. The thing is at that point it's also completely out of your hands as to whether the money is actually transferred. You have to rely on the solicitor, the bank and the mortgage broker all being able to do their job properly. Which turns out to be harder than you think. I am not used to having such big decisions being completely out of my control so it was really hard to deal with.

Also because I rang the bank on the Monday (we are completing on the Friday) and the bank tells me they have no knowledge of my account. The solicitor and the mortgage broker seem completely unconcerned. So you try not to stress about it, thinking there must be something else going on, but it sure was hard to sleep properly after hearing that. Then Thursday comes round (when the money from the bank is meant to be transferred to the solicitor for the Friday completion) and it turns out that the bank really did have no knowledge of our account. It took 45 phone calls between us, the solicitor and the mortgage broker to get it sorted out. And I'm thinking if I ever did that in my job I'd probably be fired. And yet these retail banks can behave criminally and get away with it. Because you know if the money hadn't gone through it would have been us paying the penalty for breaking the completion contract, not the bank. So like I said, some sleepless nights.

But now we are all set up in our house, and it's just something I like to think about when I need to fuel my rage fire. English houses are funny, they have to have stairs in them to count as a house, otherwise it's a bungalow, which I find hilarious. I think I would much rather a bungalow, I'm going to build massive calf muscles with the 3 flights of stairs I now have.  The house is 100 years old though, so that has been a bit weird for me, all the floors are at an angle, so your sitting in a chair and you can feel that one side of your body is bearing most of the weight. And you put bottles on the ground and they'll roll to one side. We may look at fixing that, at least all our bookshelves stand up properly and don't appear as if they'll crush us, so perhaps it's not that bad.

It's hard to get into the homeowner mindset, I do wonder if my interests will change now that I have this massive debt millstone. I am certainly invested in society staying the way it is, no anarchy or revolution for me please, unless retail bank debts are the first thing destroyed, then I'm all for it. But I wonder if I'll really get into gardening or something. I always liked the idea of a veggie patch say, or flower beds, but having only been in rental houses, it was hard to put much effort in, since you were only ever going to be there for 2 years at most. And for the last 8 years I have only lived in apartments, so not even the possibility of a garden. Now I have a place with a garden shed, it's definitely going to take some getting used to.