It’s F-Day plus 31 – a whole month (and a bit; thanks February) since our house filled with water and rendered us kinda-homeless.
We continue to live out of a series of AirBnB-like accommodations, flitting from place to place after a week or fortnight. I can’t overstate how much this feels like a hundred tiny inconveniences, piling up in front of me all at once and making it hard to see “past” them.
They’re all small potatoes compared to the bigger issue of, y’know… our house being uninhabitable. But they’re still frustrating.
I’m talking about things like discovering your spare toothbrush heads are at the “wrong” house. Or having to take extra care to plan who’s going to use which car to go to the office because the kids and the dog need dropping off (because our lives were all optimised for our local walking and bus routes). It’s a level of cognitive load that, frankly, I could do without.
Meanwhile, any relief is slow to come. We’re still without a medium-term plan for somewhere to live, because even though the insurance company has pulled their finger out and agreed to pay for say six months of rental of a place, we’re struggling to find a suitable property whose landlord is open to such a short-term let.
When the house first flooded and friends told me that I’d be faced with many months of headaches, I figured this was hyperbole. Or that, somehow, with the epic wrangling and project management skills of Ruth, JTA and I combined, that we’d be able to accelerate the process somewhat. Little did I know that so many of the problems wouldn’t be issues of scale or complexity but of bureaucracy and other people’s timescales. Clearly, we’re in it for the long haul.
It feels silly that we’re still in the first quarter of this 2026 and already I’m looking forward to next year and the point where we can look back and laugh, saying “ah, remember 2026: the year of the flood?” Sigh.
From May 1st you can rent and give 2 months notice, so “minimum term” is no longer a problem. Good luck!
Yup! We were aware of this, buuut…
Some landlords weren’t happy to deal with an insurance company paying for our house on a residential contract (to which the new regulations apply) but only on a commercial contract. So for those landlords, we had to be willing.
Also: even though the Renters’ Rights changes are retroactive, we were applying for places before they kicked in… and our insurance company were being incredibly forthright with prospective landlords about how long we expected to be living there… which gave those landlords every opportunity out-of-the-gate to reject us if they’d rather have a long-term let.
And we know that this happened: our preferred house is one where, if we were letting it privately, we could have just quietly not-mentioned that we anticipated being there for only a short time and then when the new law kicked-in we could have benefitted from it. But our insurance company got in the way of that, making it very clear to every prospective landlord how long they expected us to be there. And we were rejected from what would have been the ideal property for us as a result.
It’s pretty annoying, but the new law provides little protection until you get into a contract. And our insurance company’s excessive honesty made that part hard.