The suspense is killing me

Oh for goodness sake! It's only a few days down the line and the whole 'who's buying the house today?' game is wearing me out... Last time I wrote Michael and I had argued, analysed, agreed and made a decision to sell the house to the couple who were pissing us off least. Now, however, they're all mucking around and we're selling the house - touch wood - to the very couple who came off worst in my last post!

The saga goes something like this: couple A muck around and are dropped in favour of couple B, who reappear after a couple of weeks' absence with a good offer. Couple A counter-offer with an extra £5,000, but for that money we'd rather not have the hassle and stick with couple B. This is where we last left things, and on Tuesday afternoon I duly travelled to Nailsea to give all the documents AND copies of our passports AND our names signed in blood to our (very nice) conveyancing solicitor. I came home, I had a large drink, I sat in the garden feeling very pleased with the fact that we'd SOLD THE HOUSE.

But lo! yesterday couple A re-appeared, tails between legs, apologising madly to our agents for being rude and daft and offering an extra £12,000 above the price we'd accepted from couple B! What's a girl supposed to do? I agonised, we consulted our 'Which? Guide to Buying and Selling a Flat' (and yes, I'm aware we no longer live in a flat) - I looked up gazumping in the index and hardly dared to hope that we might legally be able, even at this late stage, to pull out of one deal and accept another. But guess what, we can, and for £12,000 we'd be fools not to. £12,000 translates to about $28,000 in Australia - enough to live on for 9 - 12 months, depending on how extravagant we might be, and given that this house is our major asset and we have to realise as much money on it as we can, we'd be mad to throw away most of a year's living expenses. So I phoned Dad, phoned our solicitor and then rang the estate agents to tell them the news, on the basis that luckily we pay THEM to do the dirty work of breaking it to couple B...

We went to bed last night feeling like heels, but also feeling that we have a primary responsibility for the welfare of our family, which depends in part at least on available cash. So we just gotta do what we gotta do, I guess.

Of course this morning, couple B came back with an increased offer but they can't match couple A and haven't really come close to it. And although I feel awful about disappointing them, Michael pointed out that having told them the bad news yesterday we've already soured the relationship with them so it's not as if they'd be very happy with us even if we did accept their revised offer - the chances are that they would have been very picky with the survey etc, etc. At least with couple A we can say 'no mucking about'. Even if the survey does throw up issues (and I can only think it's going to be issues about the condition of the timber on the rear windows, and the fact that there's no damp course in the downstairs bedroom) then we know he's got more than enough money to pay for remedial work and we won't be accepting a reduction in the offer price.

So anyway, there you are - we have hopefully sold the house - just to different people. And as it's our sixth wedding anniversary today I shall be kicking back at Moreish this evening, together with Dad, Michael, Patrick and Ella, and having a well-earned drink!

Fingers still crossed

People don't half behave badly when buying a house! We accepted an offer on our house on Friday, but the couple who lost out spent Friday being very aggressive both with us and with the estate agents. They simply couldn't accept that we'd decided to go with someone else's offer. Admittedly they came back with a last 'final' offer which beats the one we've accepted by £5,000, but they shot themselves in the foot with their behaviour. They seem to think that the agents have not adequately conveyed to us their 'proceedability', nor the fact that they've pulled some more money out of the hat. But their 'final' position included the caveat that everything that was on our 'specifically not included in the sale' list would be included. Now how likely is it that I would want to sell the rug Mum gave me on the last occasion on which I saw her before she died? Or that we'd want to give anyone the antique chandelier that Claire gave us? Or that we'd suddenly throw in thousands of pounds of other rugs and curtains when actually we need them in Australia? Being unpleasant doesn't get you very far, generally speaking, and in the end our favourable impressions of them from when they came over for a drink have been replaced by the impression that he's a bully who rather stupidly promised his wife that he'd get her the house come hell or high water, and that he'd take some trophies while he was at it, thank you.

Our agent rang me on Friday afternoon, shaking after a call with him, and said it was likely he'd come and see us over the weekend but fortunately he didn't, so we had a quiet weekend enjoying the sunshine - which was lucky for me as I'd had to organise and host the SIP summer party on Friday night, which was little short of disastrous as virtually no-one came! My helpers were unavoidably late which meant I'd had to do a lot of carrying stuff in the heat, only 12 people turned up out of a membership of over 150, and I spent the evening slaving over a hot barbecue accompanied by scathing comments from a member's partner who said helpful things like, "I'm not letting my son eat that" (because he didn't think I could recognise when a burger might be cooked) and, "It just shows you can't trust a bloody woman with a barbecue". The option of inserting one of the barbecue implements up one of his orifices became increasingly attractive as the evening dragged on. I can only say thank you to the others who bothered to come out and who made valiant conversation and lots of positive comments!

Perhaps it’s the heat and lack of sleep talking. Since Ella’s tummy bug the weekend before last she’s been waking constantly through the night and sometimes coughing and then vomiting. I took her to the doctor, who says she’s not ill any more, just suffering from a sensitised vomit reflex. I don’t know about her vomit reflex being sensitised, but I know that my sleep pattern has been sensitised into extreme nervousness when she coughs! I was up four times to her last night before 2:30am. Then Michael woke me at 5am to say I was snoring and please could I stop, and Patrick and Toby woke me at 7:30am because they were banging about while Patrick got ready for work. So I’m completely knackered!

But Michael rang a local estate/lettings agent in Coffs Harbour this morning, which was a great thing to do. The result is that our details are registered with them, we know a bit more about local schools, and someone is looking out for a rental property for us when we get there – which is now likely to be in mid-October.

So tomorrow I’ll get the ball rolling by taking all the documentation we’ve kept on the building work etc to our conveyancing solicitor in Nailsea, and we’ll see what happens. Fingers crossed! Not least because this has to be the third or fourth time I’ve typed in some of these words as the blog software has been playing up and it’s lost the entries mid-post. This one has finally been constructed in Word and will be copied across!

Fingers crossed

We've accepted an offer on the house... and I don't know whether we're pleased or sorry! The young couple who visited us twice over the weekend, are lovely but just haven't come up to scratch with the money and it's such a shame because we really liked them and would have felt that our home would be well used and well looked after. But he's a salesman and I think in the end we felt a bit like one of his customers experiencing a hard sell. Not only did they want to offer a low price, but they wanted us to throw in all the kitchen appliances (fridge/freezer, dishwasher and range cooker) free. So we've actually been feeling quite down about the whole process over the last few days.

By yesterday evening we were mulling over another 'final offer' from them, but suddenly this morning another couple, who visited at least ten days ago and made a very low offer, upped their offer to £7.5k above the other offer. We had a long talk with the agents this morning and their opinion is that we are unlikely to better the latest offer, so we have accepted it. We'll be going to Australia with less money than we had hoped, but at least we have (provisionally!) cleared the hurdle of selling the damned house! Of course, there's a lot more that could go wrong now - the surveyor hasn't stepped through the door yet - but we've started, at least.

I'm looking forward to a weekend of relative peace and quiet now, as I've told the estate agents to go away until Monday. Not only are we tired and a bit fed up, but Ella threw up again last night and so I've spent the morning at the doctor's. He reckons it isn't that her stomach bug of last weekend has come back, but that in the heatwave her tummy's a bit sensitive and didn't like the fact that she had a proper meal last night... I felt awful this morning: I went in to wake her up and she was curled up asleep in her chair! Apparently she'd thrown up in the early hours (very quietly, I may add) and didn't want to wake us up! So she just cleaned the worst off herself with a wipe, grabbed a blanket and curled up in the chair. Hopefully now that the worst of the heat has gone away for a few days her digestive system might just settle down. Like I said, fingers crossed.

Hot, hot, HOT!

I cheated and went out in the car this afternoon - I would usually have walked it - but even after being in the shade all morning the car's thermometer read 32 degrees C outside... The thermometer on the patio got up to 39 degrees! But I love it, especially in the garden, where the ash tree actually serves a useful function spreading dappled shade over the patio and the deck area.

We've been having our 'selling the house' woes over the last two weeks. Never mind the pain of keeping the darned place tidy all the time, the main problem is the number of stupid offers we've had and stupid people coming to see it... We were royally led up the garden path by a young couple who visited us three times and then it turned out that Mummy didn't like the flats. We've had a very low offer from a woman with no children for whom there still weren't enough bedrooms. You have to ask, bedrooms for who? And why make an offer for a house that doesn't have what you want it to have?

Since then we've been forced to conclude that we were over-optimistic about the price we were asking and we have reduced the asking price. Despite having guests last weekend (and Ella had a LOVELY tummy bug - keeping things looking calm was something of an achievement!) we had two viewings and a second viewing, and we've now got two offers on the books of £15k under the reduced asking price - and the couple who made a second visit on Sunday evening would like us to throw in all the white goods for free at that price, too.

After consultation with the estate agents we're going to wait until the end of next week before we come back with any kind of decision... the house is being re-advertised this weekend, so we may have more interest, and one of the couples who visited last weekend is now on holiday and won't be able to give any feedback to the agents until they get back on Monday. Who knows, maybe they'll offer asking price and we'll be able to accept?!

Meanwhile, at least our friends who came to stay for the weekend were able to comment enthusiastically about how lovely the place looks now that it's so tidy!

Party weekend!

Thanks to everyone who came to see us over the weekend: we still missed a lot of people, but it was really lovely to see everyone who was able to come - about 60 of our friends all up! The rain held off, and although the sun wasn't exactly shining we didn't get more than a spot of rain either...

I'm sure we'll actually see most people again before we go, but it was still quite poignant having the party because we'll miss you all! Our party recipe is usually, 'take friends, throw them into a warm place together, saute in alcohol, add food and leave to simmer for hours...' and it seems to work. I daresay we'll be able to make a similar recipe with different people in a slightly warmer place, but it won't be the same without you.

Knock me down with a feather

Well, this isn't strictly speaking on the subject of us moving to Australia except tangentially... I went into UWE yesterday to have a farewell tutorial with Richard, and I came out of UWE an hour or so later having been invited to ditch the MA and start a PhD based on the research proposal I submitted for an assignment in the Research Methods module... Blimey!

It's brilliant - not least because it fills a two-year hiatus in my study opportunities in between arriving in Australia on a temporary visa and being able, possibly, to pick up my MA again at Southern Cross university once I'd got permanent residency (normally two years). I had various plans for filling the gap including doing some organisational work for Exchange Partners in Print and I've also got an international exchange exhibition lined up between Waringah Printmakers in Sydney and Spike Island Printmakers in Bristol, but I must admit it was always going to be difficult maintaining some of the momentum when it was all going to have to be self-generated.

I'm good at motivating myself and developing projects to get my teeth stuck into, but it's more fun when you've got something concrete to work towards, especially when that 'something' enables me to maintain links with UWE and develop new relationships with some of the people there and a whole bunch of other people I don't yet know but will come to meet through my research!

Anyway, I'm unbelievably flattered to have been asked, and I'm looking forward to it all. It gives me a concrete something of my own - a focus that requires me to be in Australia to do the research and make the art AND requires me to come back to uni in Bristol a couple of times a year... Great!

Waiting, waiting, 1,2,3

Well, my visa application has been received by the Australian High Commission in London and I've now got a named contact in their Migration Branch and an all-important reference number. This means that I can start the police check and various health checks, so I've filled in the Police Record Data Protection forms and sent them off, and I've collected the chest X-rays I had done last Friday so that I can take them to my medical appointment in Southville tomorrow. Of course there have been preliminary forms to fill in for that, too, and I've been able to look at the questions that the doctor will have to assess. Most interesting was a check-list with lots of questions and two possible categories of answer, 'Normal' and 'Abnormal', including the question, "Intelligence?" Leaving aside the intelligence of phrasing the question in that way, I wish I could see what the answer will be, but unfortunately it's all confidential and will be sealed and posted off by the doctor (once I've paid another £70 fee).