Today, Ruth and JTA received a letter. It told them about an upcoming change to the
agreement of their (shared, presumably) Halifax credit card.
Except… they don’t have a shared Halifax credit card. Could it be a scam? Some sort of phishing attempt, maybe, or perhaps somebody taking out a credit card in their names?
I happened to be in earshot and asked to take a look at the letter, and was surprised to discover that all of the other details – the last four digits of the card, the credit
limit, etc. – all matched my Halifax credit card.
Halifax sent a letter to me, about my credit card… but addressed it to… two other people I live with‽
I spent a little over half an hour on the phone with Halifax, speaking to two different advisors, who couldn’t fathom what had happened or how. My credit card is not (and has never
been) a joint credit card, and the only financial connection I have to Ruth and JTA is that I share a mortgage with them. My guess is that some person or computer at Halifax tried to
join-the-dots from the mortgage outwards and re-assigned my credit card to them, instead?
Eventually I had to leave to run an errand, so I gave up on the phone call and raised a complaint with Halifax in writing. They’ve promised to respond within… eight weeks. Just
brilliant.
This blog post is the sixth and final part in a series about buying our first house.
In the fifth post, we finally exchanged contracts with the sellers after a long-running disagreement about who was going to repair the
front door…
A series of days flew by in a cardboard-box-filled blur, and suddenly it was the last Friday in July – the day upon which our sale was completed. I’d run out of spare days of annual
leave, so I was only able to justify taking the afternoon off to pick up a van, scoop up Ruth and Matt, get the keys to the new house, and meet JTA
there.
The first mission was to collect a van from Europcar, so that we’d be able to spend the entire weekend going up and down the A34.
The estate agents were conveniently just two doors down from a locksmith, so we got some keys cut to what we believed
to be the new front door, while we were there. It’s also sandwiched between a funeral home and a florist, which makes it sort of a one-stop street when somebody dies and you want to put
their house on the market.
The great thing about getting champagne as a housewarming gift, from your estate agent, is that you don’t need to unpack the corkscrew to open it.
We soon discovered that the “fix” that had ultimately been applied to the broken front door was simply to swap it for a different exterior door, from the inner porch. A little cheeky,
and a little frustrating after all the fighting we’d done, but not the end of the world: we still had a perfectly good front door and – as we planned to use the annex as part of the
main house, anyway, we were happy to take the door down and leave an open doorway, anyway.
We gave JTA the honour of being the first to open the door to our new home. After some fiddling with what turned out to be the wrong key, the door turned out to be already unlocked.
A vacant house feels big and empty. Our new – large! – living room felt enormous. Meanwhile, packing up our old house – with its painted walls and wooden floors – was beginning to sound
echoey as it became emptier.
Lounging in the living room. (or is she living in the lounge?)
We spent a long time working out which of the many keys we had fit which of the locks, as there were quite so many: there’s the front door, the inner front door, the other
inner front door, the back door, the outer conservatory door, the inner conservatory door, the gate lock, the shed lock, the window locks, and a good handful of keys besides that we
still haven’t identified the purpose of. It’s was like the previous owners just bought a pile of additional keys, just as a prank.
Our old house – New Earth – became emptier and yet more-chaotic as the stacks of boxes were gradually loaded into the van.
We’d rented a van over a long weekend in which to do the majority of the move, and we’d hired some burly men with a bigger van to move some of the heaviest furniture, and to collect a
piano that we’d bought (yes, we have a piano now; booyah).
“Pack the living room into the van,” I said. “Okay,” said JTA, putting the kettle on.
Very helpfully, Alec came and joined us, and helped run an enormous amount of boxes and furniture down and out of the three-stories of our old house, and in and up the three-stories of
our new house. Why do we keep torturing ourselves with these tall buildings? At least our new staircases are a better shape for carrying mattresses up.
Now that I’ve discovered that I can hire muscular men on-demand, I’m not sure that I’ll ever do anything else.
The weather stayed good, with only occasional showers (and thankfully, never when we were carrying soft furnishings between a van and a building) and one brief but wild thunderstorm
(that we managed to avoid only with a quick re-arrangement of the van contents, slamming the doors, and sprinting for cover), and we worked hard, and we ended up a day ahead of schedule
before we were finished.
Alec helped out with lots of heavy lifting, but also with ‘testing’ the piano. Which, before it had been tuned, wasn’t the best of experiences for anybody involved.
In order to minimise the amount of the deposit that we might otherwise lose, from our old place, and because we rightly anticipated being too exhausted from the move to do all of the
requisite cleaning ourselves, we’d hired some professionals. By this point, we weren’t even able to think in terms of money like normal people – by the time you’re spending five figures
on tax and lawyers, you find it pretty easy to shrug off the cost of a team of cleaners!
I’m pretty sure that the local ice cream van driver was following us around, because on each day of the move, he’d arrive on the scene right after we’d finished unloading a van and
could really do with an ice cream break.
This did mean that Ruth and I had to each work from home, from the old house, for one last day while we let the cleaners, gardener etc. in. We left in the old house an absolute minimum
of furniture: a single desk, chair, laptop computer, cup (for water), router, and cables.
One desk, one chair, one laptop, one router… in a five bedroom house. It’s a lonely life.
As I left the house for the last time, as empty and quiet as it was the day we
first moved in, I felt a sense of serenity; a calm that came from a number of simultaneous realisations… that this was probably the last house move I’d have to do in a long while…
that I finally lived somewhere that I didn’t (theoretically, at least) have to ask for somebody’s permission before I put a picture hook up or painted a wall… and that at long last I
was paying off my own mortgage, rather than somebody else’s. It was the beginning of a new era.
The first box that we unpacked was the one containing Alec, of course.
Changing tack from the theme by which our houses have been named since 2010, our new home is called Greendale.
And yes, there’s a website (albeit a little sparse, for now). There’s always a
website.
Susan didn’t help much with the packing and moving, but I’m not sure I’ve put a photo of her and Matt online yet. So now I have.
There’ll be a housewarming party on 22nd September: if you’re a friend of one or more of us, you’ve probably received an invitation already. But if you haven’t – and
it’s not impossible, because we weren’t sure of everybody’s best email addresses these days – and you expect you should have, let me know. It’s not that we don’t love you: we just don’t
love you enough to remember to invite you to stuff, that’s all.
This blog post is the third in a series about buying our first house. If you
haven’t already, you might like to read the first part. In
the second post in the series, we’d put an offer on a house which
had been accepted… but of course that’s still early days in the story of buying a house…
We hooked up with Truemans, a local solicitor, after discovering that getting
our conveyancing services from a local solicitor is only marginally more-expensive than going with one of the online/phone/post based national ones, and you get the advantage of being
able to drop in and harass them if things aren’t going as fast as you’d like. Truemans were helpful from day one, giving us a convenient checklist of all of the steps in the process of
buying a house. I’m sure we could have got all the same information online, but by the time I was thinking about offers and acceptance and moving and mortgages and repayments and
deposits and everything else, it was genuinely worth a little extra money just to have somebody say “next, this needs to happen,” in a reassuring voice.
This gargantuan beast is our mortgage application form. All of those pages are double-sided, by the way.
Meanwhile, we got on with filling out our mortgage application form. Our choice of lenders – which Stefan, who I’d mentioned in the last post, had filtered for us – was limited slightly
by the fact that we wanted a mortgage for three people, not for one or two; but it wasn’t limited by as much as you might have thought. In practice, it was only the more-exotic mortgage
types (e.g. Option ARMs, some varieties of interest-only mortgage) that we were restricted from, and these weren’t
particularly appealing to us anyway. One downside of there being three of us, though, was that while our chosen lender had computerised their application process, the computerised
version wasn’t able to handle more than two applicants, so we instead had to fill out a mammoth 22-page paper form in order to apply. At least it weeds out people who aren’t serious, I
suppose.
The front door of our intended new home had recently sustained some… damage. That didn’t bode well.
I revisited the house to check out a few things from the outside: in particular, I was interested in the front door, which had apparently been broken during a…
misunderstanding… by the current owners, who are in the middle of what seems like a complicated divorce. The estate agent had promised that it would be repaired before the
sale, but when I went to visit I found that this hadn’t happened yet. Of course, now we had lawyers on our side, so it was a quick job to ask them to send a letter to the seller’s
solicitor, setting the repair of the door as a condition upon which the sale was dependent.
The results of our Environmental Search were perhaps the most-interesting. But I’ll understand if you don’t think it’s as interesting as I do.
Our solicitors had also gotten started with the requisite local searches. One of the first things a conveyancing solicitor will do for you is do a little research to
ensure that the property really is owned by the people who are selling it, that there’s no compulsory purchase order so that a motorway can be built through the middle of it, that it’s
actually connected to mains water and sewers, that planning permission was correctly obtained for any work that’s been done on it, and that kind of thing. One of the first of these
searches to produce results was the environmental search.
A map of the area around our new house, as it was about a century ago, unearthed by our convenient tame librarian.
One of the things that was revealed be the environmental search was that the area was at a significantly higher-than-average risk of subsidence, had the construction not been done in a
particular way – using subsidence-proof bricks, or something, I guess? I theorised that this might be related to the infill activities that (the environmental search also reported) had
gone on over the last hundred and fifty years. The house is near a major waterway, in an area that was probably once lower-lying and wetter, but many of the small ponds in the area were
filled in in the early part of the 20th century (and then, of course, the area was developed as the suburbs of central Oxfordshire expanded, in the 1980s). Conveniently, we have
a librarian on our house-buying team, and he was able to pull up a stack of old OS maps showing the area, and we
were able to find our way around this now almost-unidentifiable landscape.
A map showing a field, hedgerows, water course and – highlighted in blue – a pond. The second highlighting in blue (bottom left) is a letter ‘O’, not a pond. I got carried away
highlighting things, okay?
Sure enough, there were ponds there, once, but that’s as far as our research took us. Better, we thought, to just pass on the environmental search report to a qualified buildings
surveyor, and have them tell us whether or not it was made out of subsidence-proof bricks or shifting-ready beams or whatever the hell it is that you do when you’re
building a house to make it not go wonky. Seriously, I haven’t a clue, but I know that there are experts who do.
In this highly-realistic diagram, which wouldn’t look out of place in a geography textbook, houses go wonky because they’re built on ground that became more-compressible after it was
drained. This is what I want to avoid.
Given that the house we’re looking at is relatively new, I don’t anticipate there being any problems (modern building regulations are a lot more stringent than their historical
counterparts), but when you’re signing away six-figures, you learn to pay attention to these kinds of things.
Hopefully, the fourth blog post in this series will be about exchanging contracts and getting ready to move in to our new home: fingers crossed!
