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far, generally speaking, and in the end our favourable impressions of them from when they came over for a drink have been replaced by the impression that he's a bully who rather stupidly promised his wife that he'd get her the house come hell or high water, and that he'd take some trophies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!