One of my fav pix of Lucie and I taken by redux at the Kings Arms in Salford.

I’d really hoped that the next post on this blog was going to be all about us moving in to our new home but sadly that’s not going to happen now.

Our buyer pulled out for the second and final time today sending our fragile little chain (and our high hopes of moving to our new home) tumbling to earth.

We’ve received no concrete reasons for why but when she requested an additional damp and timber survey about three weeks ago we knew that we were in trouble. Her ‘independent’ survey picked up some problems in our cellar (technically the remit of the building management company who manages the common areas of the structure) but despite getting our own survey done, clearing out both our cellar and next door’s and offering to have all the work done before she moved in, just wasn’t enough to convince her.

The damage had been done weeks earlier when her surveyor (a small company based in Oldham) picked up what looks to be wet rot in the cellar. The guy went further though, inappropriately spooking our buyer out of the sale and quoting a ridiculous figure of £5,000 to get the problems fixed. At that point she had pulled out but we assured her we’d deal with any problems and even requested an additional survey – and she agreed to proceed with the sale. Our own surveyor (a reputable national company) confirmed there were some problems but they could be sorted for about £1,200. But without even seeing the new survey’s results she decided to pull out. Without the proceeds from the sale we can’t afford to progress with our purchase so everything comes crashing to the ground.

Our exchange date was pencilled in for September 18. It’s heartbreaking to get so close but that’s the danger of entering into a chain. I really feel for our vendors who have had to go through this twice now.

It means we have to go back through the selling process all over again (several hundred pounds out of pocket – several thousand once all the work has been done. But you pick yourself up, dust yourself down and move on eh? We’ve at least cleared the cellar of all the rubbish that had accumulated there over several years – Allsop, the building management company, even plumped for the skip hire. And we can have a fresh look at where we want to live – who knows, we might even get a better offer for the flat down the track.

We’ll definitely not start looking for the next place until the deal is done next time and we’ll be a little more rigorous about checking out who our buyer is.

A pox on all their houses.

Could we be moving to a new house soon?

What an amazing epic few weeks we’ve had… in the space of just two-and-a-half weeks we’ve accepted an offer from a buyer for our flat, welcomed our lovely little daughter Lucie into the world, and then had an offer accepted on a house we hope to buy!

Most people would think we’re crazy to do all this at once but we did get married and move to the other side of the world all within the space of a month back in 2004, so doing all the “big stuff” simultaenously this time around seemed almost like second nature.

We’d been looking around the Chorlton area of South Manchester for three-bed terraces and weren’t terribly impressed with the properties we’d seen – so it was a relief when the four-bed Victorian terrace we hope to buy came back on the market after the buyer’s chain collapsed.

Our potential new home on Lime Ave in Urmston is a real family house. Two reception rooms downstairs with a huge light-filled kitchen with integrated appliances and three good-sized bedrooms and a bathroom upstairs. There’s a children’s playground and miniature steam railway in the nearby park (I’m also thrilled there’s an old suburban cinema in the neighbourhood too). Urmston’s also great for schools, has a few good restaurants, is a little closer to work and is about to get a new shopping centre. There are even baby gates pre-installed on the staircases so it’s just perfect for us!

We’re normally pretty good with playing with a poker face when we go to house viewings but by the time we got to the third-floor loft room filled with guitars and music equipment, I knew we’d be making an offer pretty much there and then. By the end of the day, after a little haggling, we had a offer accepted.

Things are moving quite quickly. We’ve got a new mortgage offer in the bag and had a surveyor come round and look at the flat (and they didn’t stay long so I’m hoping that’s a good thing?). We’ve also had a surveyor go and look at the place we hope to buy – so it’s all in the hands of the solicitors now.

It’s a treacherous time though… if our buyer pulls out, we’ll have to do the same and whole game begins again. Our vendor is hoping for a quick sale as is our buyer – so hopefully we can tee everything up and be in our new home for September.

Our flat with the new JP Brimelow sign out front

Just one week after switching estate agents, we have not only had our first viewing but had a counter offer accepted by our prospective buyer.

We’re gob smacked. It’s all happened so fast. We’re not getting too excited just yet as the offer is still subject to survey and exchange of contracts but we’ve taken a massive first step.

It’s also a fantastic result given we’ve only just changed estate agents. We had been with Halifax for just over two months and hadn’t had a single viewing (the prospective buyer mentioned in out last post pulled out at the last moment) and they seemed to have run out of ideas about how to generate intesest. We’d also been passed between three different staff at their office and had had almost no feedback on the property at all.

We’d taken a punt with Halifax who hooked us with a great sales pitch but just failed to deliver – they were also at a disadvantage being based in an adjoining suburb – and the South Manchester market is pretty fickle like that.

Bad news for Halifax

So we took the decision to sack them. And it seems to have paid off – very quickly.

Ironically, in the last two weeks of our notice period we received the letter above from the owners of the Withington branch of the Halifax informing us that we’d need to find an alternative agent as they were closing the branch. Pretty good timing that.

We came very close (in our desperation) to renting the flat out and taking an additional mortgage instead – and should the deal fall through it’s an option that’s still on the table.

But we decided to try out the Didsbury-based agents (who we’d ruled out before for being a bit snobbish) and settled on JP Brimelow (as they have the biggest shopfront and the most online reach). Within a week of signing up they had lined up our first viewing. And later that day the first offer came in – about £9000 below our asking price. We were advised to accept from both the agent and Jayne’s folks.

Despite that we took a punt and came in with a slighter higher counter offer. A couple of hours later we got the call – it had been accepted.

So, it’s all in the hands of the solicitors now. And hopefully the survey will vindicate all of the structural repairs we undertook during the renovations.

It does mean we can go ahead and make offers ourselves but that’s another post… and another game altogether.

Finally, after being listed on rightmove for almost a month, taking out a facebook ad and a little toing and froing with our estate agents, we have our very first viewing!

Ironically our potential buyer spotted the property in the local newspaper!

It’s a bit nerve-wracking this whole selling caper. It’s the not knowing that makes it so difficult – without any feedback from viewings, it’s really hard to know how we’re really doing.

We’d heard very little back from our estate agents. There have been a couple of enquiries – one guy thought the whole building was up for sale. Another thought we were asking too much. Another was turned off because it’s a ground floor flat. Other than that, we’d received a few promising rightmove stats but had little else to go on.

Out of curiosity more than anything else, I created a facebook marketplace page and took out a targeted facebook ad to promote it, with interesting results. We went with a Pay per click campaign aimed at 25 to 36 year olds in Greater Manchester with a daily cap of US$5. We ended up with over 20,000 impressions over a week and a half and 19 actual clickthroughs to the marketplace page for a total spend of US$8.15. Not bad really.

Fingers crossed our first time buyer will fall in love with the flat and make an offer!

We’re finally there. After several months of hard graft, crafty project management and one or two drops of blood, sweat and tears, we are finally on the market.

The last few weeks have really seemed to fly past. One moment we we’re measuring up plinths and skirting board, the next the estate agents were round taking photos. There’s even a sign up in the front yard now!

Take a look at our listing on rightmove

The process of picking an estate agent was an easy one in the end. The two local Didsbury agents that we approached pretty much ruled themselves out of the race – one couldn’t even spell our name correctly. The other didn’t bother returning our calls or emails. So, we went with Halifax who, despite being based in an adjoining suburb, proved to be the most pro-active. They called us without fail every fortnight to see how the project was coming along and they gave us some good advice along the way – the others just didn’t come anywhere near them.

With the housing market in serious downturn, it’s probably the worst time to be trying to sell a flat in the UK (and Halifax were quite honest with us about how dire it might be) but we’ll just have to see how it goes.

Risky Business. Bring it on.

We’re dangerously close to finishing the renovations now. Nothing could possibly go wrong… could it?

If our experience on this ‘little’ project has taught us anything it’s that your initial budget estimates are pure fantasy and that everything will take two or three times longer than you think. And then, there’s the stuff you just hadn’t planned for…

…like the bathroom from hell.

First it was the wet rot in the floorboards. Then the power shorted-out half way through the new bath suite going in. Then the toilet sprang a leak. Then the tiles ‘mysteriously’ began falling off the walls (well ok, let’s be honest, the tiles fell off the wall because I hadn’t properly primed the surfaces but it’s probably another warning sign that the house is built over some ancient Celtic burial ground or something… I was convinced at one point that the place was cursed.)

…Anyway.

The point is that the whole project has taken a lot longer than we expected and cost us quite a bit more than we’d planned on. After what seems like a month of constantly going back and forth to B&Q, we’re very almost, fingers crossed, there.

I kind of ‘lost it’ at one point while putting in the bathroom flooring and on that basis I wanted to re-invent this room as a place of calm. It’s a complete move away from our “don’t personalise / keep it white” mantra but sod it. So, there’s a light, sky blue, seaside theme going on in there now and it really seems to work. It’s a world away from the dank, dark green hovel that we’d endured for so long. I feel calm there now. I almost feel like I’m near the ocean.

The kitchen has pretty much been reclaimed now too. Family friend Michael came over and got all the cabinets and doors in and then Pete and Matthew sorted out most of the flooring. It’s just a completely different space. I can’t wait to get everyone round and have the kitchen pump out our thankyous to one and all.

It also feels like we’ve turned a corner into a more creative part of the project. Matt has sorted out all the new lighting fixtures and the walls are crying out for some artwork. I had catch in colour print up a photograph on canvas that we’d taken of Newtown while we were back in Australia (which is now proudly on display in the loungeroom). I’ve got Salford’s print shop working on a couple of others for different spaces in the flat too.

We’ve got a tonne’s worth of gravel and stones arriving next week to give the back courtyard a lift and there’s little else to do now but a bit of grouting, a little touching up of the painting, some new skirting boards to be fitted and a picture or two to be put up and fussed over.

We’re on the home stretch it seems… let’s just hope our 80’s-style boiler can last the distance to the finishing line!

Sadly, the pix above aren’t a ‘before and after’ series. The first is our current bathroom, complete with no bath, no pedestal, half the plasterboard missing and a great big hole in the floor. And the second, the oasis we have escaped to while the bathroom work is being done… the wonderful Didsbury House Hotel.

This gorgeous hotel is supposed to be our ‘anniversary place’ but given bubs is due on July 30 (a day before our anniversary), and half of our flat is currently a construction zone, we’ve moved our annual visit forward a few months.

It’s complete and utter luxury. Contemporary Italian fixtures, a New York-style split-level layout complete with loft bathroom (and freestanding clawfoot bath and monsoon shower) that overlooks the bedroom. I spent an hour in the bath just staring up at the clouds through the skylight in the ceiling and stepping into the shower was like walking under a waterfall. After four days washing at the kitchen sink (we have been without a bath or shower) it’s like being transported to another planet. I’ve never known ‘clean’ quite like this!

It’s come after an amazing day where we had our week 20 pregnancy scan and a tough week where the renovation budget seemed to go through the roof just as everything else seemed to be falling through the bathroom floor!

Mum and baby are doing very well. Bubs was again avoiding the camera and performing somersaults during the scan. Our sonographer and midwife have given us the all clear and we’ve got a great new pic to add to the collection. We’re having a 4d scan in about a month’s time where we’ll get to see Bub’s face for the first time!

But, back to the flat. We discovered serious wet rot in the bathroom floorboards and had to rush to get the bath and pedestal out before they went crashing through the floor into the basement. All this after I’d spent two days “resurfacing” the bathtub (basically it’s a fancy way of saying I painted the bath with some special white paint – everyone except me agreed that it looked a bit cheap and rubbish anyway!).  Just to add to the mess, in preparing the walls for the plasterer to come and re-skim the walls, half the rotten moldy plasterboard came away from the wall… it’s been an adventure!

I should also mention at this point that we’re onto our second plasterer. Paul stepped into the breach after our first plasterer, Lee, took a fall while taking down the ceiling in the kitchen and tore a ligament in his ankle. So far Paul has done a pretty good job. The kitchen is now done and the new cabinets go in next week with a bit of help from family friend Michael.

Our plumber John is coming back to put the new bathroom suite in I found for cheap on the interweb next week as well…. I’m hoping that by the end of the Easter break we’ll be almost, if not completely, done.

I’ll be having a very long, very hot shower at the end of all of this I can assure you!

I knew it was a mistake the moment we walked into our neighbour’s recently-renovated flat.

The place looked so great. So slick. So completely and utterly… unattainable – certainly on our budget anyway. She’s spent £16,000 on making it a cool contemporary pad (that’s about four times our budget) and it really shows (from the designer kitchen through to the new bathroom). Nevermind…

While ours will never quite have the same level of chic as next door’s I’ve got to say that it’s really starting to look pretty damn respectable.

Lee and Tony from LSR did a fantastic job on the loungeroom and hallway plastering… and they were nice fellas to boot. Pete and Sue have also stepped in again to lend their expertise to the painting and the loungeroom and hallway are very near to complete. We’ve got the furniture back in, picked up some cheap trendy-looking vases and dry grasses from Matalan and for all intents and purposes the front room looks the part. We’ve still got to add some tweaks like new light switches and a decent light fixture but it’s about 90% there.

I’ve got to admit though, I don’t think DIY is really for me. The thought of removing the last of the woodchip from the kitchen just filled with with dread this weekend. It’s bloody hard work really and in the end we’ll be handing over this new space to someone else – well hopefully soon anyway.

It’s amazing just what an inflexible deadline can motivate you to do though… If you hadn’t already twigged from the pic) we’re having a baby in July (hurrah, the embargo is lifted!) so there’s plenty of motivation (and trust me, when your arms are aching and you just can’t find the strength to scrape any more woodchip or paint ceilings or sand back the bits around the door, you really really need it sometimes). I reckon there’s probably a whole other blog about the joys of being impending parents. There’s an idea…

Work starts on the kitchen re-plastering tomorrow and we’ve also taken an unusual money-saving tactic with the bathroom by attempting to re-surface the avocado bathtub in shiny new white using a DIY kit rather than fork out for a new one (it’s a 1600mm tub which means it costs a lot more than the standard 1700mm you’ll find in the cheap suites from Wickes or B&Q. Our bathroom isn’t very wide so fitting a standard-sized bath would mean changing the layout and moving where the taps currently are – not cheap I’m told).

Moving the furniture back into the loungeroom means we’ve reclaimed some space in the bedroom. It’s nice to have it back to relative normality. We’ve really missed it. I rescued my guitar from where it had been stored away for the last two months today and had a good play in between bouts with the steamer in the kitchen and the acoustics in the lounge are sounding sweet.

I certainly wouldn’t recommend anyone attempt to live in the property they are in the process of renovating. It’s not fun. At the moment the kitchen is out of action and we are making cups of tea in the hallway. It’s all a little strange…

We’re almost there.

We’ve decided to abandon our ambitious renovation plans, sell up Burton Rd, and move on.

A combination of circumstance and the ongoing frustration at the demands of the property’s freehold owners have conspired to put our plans to add a second bedroom to the sword.

So it’s all hands on deck to get the place tarted up and on the market for March (when we hope the weather and economic climate won’t be quite as bleak). Pete and Sue have been helping us get the place in shape and the first of the estate agents is coming over on the weekend to give us an appraisal.

Energized from 4 weeks in sunny Australia over Christmas, we’ve been making steady progress and have completely removed the woodchip from the loungeroom and hallway. (I can’t recommend Wallwik enough for this process. You apply the Wallwik sheets to the wall (or tack them to the ceiling), keep them wet for 20 minutes and then the woodchip peels straight off the wall with minimum scrapping required. It’s a brilliant product).

Lee from LSR Plastering is coming along next week to reskim the walls and once we’ve finished stripping back the kitchen he’ll be working his magic on the walls in there too.

Want to work off a little stress? Remove your kitchen cabinets. It’s way too much fun. So far I’ve destroyed the breakfast bar, a few metres of tiling and one of the floor cabinets and I can’t tell you how incredibly cathartic it is! Rather than completely gut the kitchen and replace it though, we’ve picked up new door and drawer fronts from B&Q and we’re planning to throw in new flooring once the wet rot in the floor joists has been dealt with (but that’s a whole other post on tendering out work).

The bathroom is getting the full work over too. The 70s-style avocado fixtures are disappearing and a new white suite is going in. The hardest part of the entire process is keeping it neutral. It’s tempting to throw in a bit of character here and there but there’s just no point. Neutral and contemporary is the mantra.

The hunt for a new place has also begun. We’ve looked at a few properties in surrounding suburbs like Chorlton, Withington and Heaton Moor and even further-a-field in Urmston. The ideal new home is a three bedroom terrace house (a little bit of Newtown goes a long way), nearish to good schools and a park (and if there’s a an old-style suburban cinema nearby then that would definitely complete the package). Whether we’ll find it is another question.

Right now it’s ‘needs must’ and we have plenty of incentive to drive us on. But that’s another post…