After so much conjecture about buying a house, it was all meant to get decided today.
While all indications suggest that buying a house in the current market is madness, we've plunged ahead against seemingly insurmountable odds. At first, it was getting credit. As foreigners, we not to be trusted by the banking establishment. Then, it has been the system itself which provides so many systemic road-blocks, you'd think you were trying to escape an Eastern block country in 1967 rather than give someone a bunch of money for an old, run-down house in a crowded, dirty city. Hiccups in the system prolonged the experience, the best being the mortgage lender moving head offices and leaving everyone in our chain waiting for them to pull it together.
Now that we've negotiated the various hurdles, we are left wondering if this is our best idea ever. Months of speculation by the experts have forcasted a cooling-off, if not down-turn in the housing market. Is it the British penchant for worrying or is it the reality of US mortgage crisis reaching beyond US borders? Then, of course, one of the significant mortgage lenders over here ran into a massive crisis the other day. Northern Rock (is anyone noticing the possible metephor with Canada here?) has declared a state of emergency as its investors and customers clamour to pull out. Cripes. The possible collapse of the banking industry would really conspire against us buying this house.... of course, that is a woeful overstatement. Still, we've heard nothing today from the Estate Agent, despite them having hassled us for weeks about being ready to move, move, move.
So, is it shocking customer service? Is it systemic incomeptence? Is it the wholesale collapse of the banking industry? Is it that our mortgage lender is still on summer holiday? Tough to say. My bet is that we won't exchange contracts today. The irony being: somehow we will get blamed for it. We've got the accents that will have everyone else in the chain nodding their heads in collective understanding. It must, after all, be the Canadians.
Monday, September 17, 2007
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Away In a Manger
We have developed a bedtime routine for Anna that I enjoy almost as much as her. She seems to like the routine, regularly declaring at about 7pm: "Anna. Bed."
A key element is me lying on the floor beside her cot. I put a collection of small pillows behind my head. Anna usually confirms I will be lying down, explaining to me: "Daddy. Pillows." And then I sing. Some of you will appreciate that I am likely doing more harm than good to poor Anna's future as a musician, but I like singing to someone who clearly doesn't care that fewer than half of the notes are remotely in tune.
I also have a pretty small repertoire of songs. I have Twinkle, Twinkle. It's an old standby, but reliable and appropriate for going to bed. I can pull of Ba, Ba, Black sheep and know enough versus of Mary Had a Little Lamb to fill a couple of minutes. It ends a little abruptly but both Anna and I are comfortable with my ending. Thanks to many campfires and a Raffi CD that gets too much airplay in the car, I can also 'sing' Kumbaya. I won't lie, it's a favourite.
My last and most accomplished song is one my mother used to sing to me when I was young. Away in a Manger. I have received a certain degree of ridicule for singing this song as a year-round bedtime song. The other day, a certain Lindsay Atkinson asked if I followed it up with Jingle Bells or I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas. It has since occurred to me that I do know a number of Christmas songs. Certainly more Christmas songs than lullabies. I am now waiting for the official word that Christmas season has begun to broaden my repertoire: North American retail. I figure if I drag Christmas tunes out til mid January, I should get a good 2, 2.5 months out of them.
Anna, however, has gotten used to our little routine. Just tonight, she was pretending to put Rupert and Teddy Bear to bed (Rupert was my teddy and Teddy Bear is from Vince and Cristina) and I started to sing Away in a Manger. I wasn't half way through the first line and Anna's thumb was in her mouth and she lay down. Ange and I laughed. She got up. I started singing again. She lay down. It still makes me smile.
A photo from the weekend, where we met Lindsay and Mike in the Cotswalds (Bourton-on-the-Water)... just before the Christmas song teasing:
And, "I like ice cream!":
A key element is me lying on the floor beside her cot. I put a collection of small pillows behind my head. Anna usually confirms I will be lying down, explaining to me: "Daddy. Pillows." And then I sing. Some of you will appreciate that I am likely doing more harm than good to poor Anna's future as a musician, but I like singing to someone who clearly doesn't care that fewer than half of the notes are remotely in tune.
I also have a pretty small repertoire of songs. I have Twinkle, Twinkle. It's an old standby, but reliable and appropriate for going to bed. I can pull of Ba, Ba, Black sheep and know enough versus of Mary Had a Little Lamb to fill a couple of minutes. It ends a little abruptly but both Anna and I are comfortable with my ending. Thanks to many campfires and a Raffi CD that gets too much airplay in the car, I can also 'sing' Kumbaya. I won't lie, it's a favourite.
My last and most accomplished song is one my mother used to sing to me when I was young. Away in a Manger. I have received a certain degree of ridicule for singing this song as a year-round bedtime song. The other day, a certain Lindsay Atkinson asked if I followed it up with Jingle Bells or I'm Dreaming of a White Christmas. It has since occurred to me that I do know a number of Christmas songs. Certainly more Christmas songs than lullabies. I am now waiting for the official word that Christmas season has begun to broaden my repertoire: North American retail. I figure if I drag Christmas tunes out til mid January, I should get a good 2, 2.5 months out of them.
Anna, however, has gotten used to our little routine. Just tonight, she was pretending to put Rupert and Teddy Bear to bed (Rupert was my teddy and Teddy Bear is from Vince and Cristina) and I started to sing Away in a Manger. I wasn't half way through the first line and Anna's thumb was in her mouth and she lay down. Ange and I laughed. She got up. I started singing again. She lay down. It still makes me smile.
A photo from the weekend, where we met Lindsay and Mike in the Cotswalds (Bourton-on-the-Water)... just before the Christmas song teasing:
And, "I like ice cream!":
An Ongoing Saga
To the surprise of almost no one who has ever dealt with a property transaction in the UK, we're only marginally closer to moving into the house we've still only allegedly purchased. It has come to the point where everyone is almost ready to exchange contracts. Once that has happened, it is all legally binding and (for the most part) there are usually no hiccups thereafter.
We had some survey work done on the house which discovered a few little but somewhat costly problems with the house. One was a leak in the roof. The other a problem with how the water tanks had been installed. The surveyor was keen to point out that these sort of issues were to be expected in a house of its age (approximately 120 years old). My dad read a copy of the report. He seemed pleased that the house was not about to imminently collapse in on itself and declared the structure fit to buy. Ange and I suggested we share the cost of the repairs with the seller.
Only, suggesting something to the seller isn't an entirely straight-forward procedure. We could go through the Estate Agent. However, as we're not paying them in this transaction and I have every reason to believe they're acting in their interest (i.e. commission) before anything else, we can't go through them. Good old Tim at Bridges is very quick to accuse us of holding up the process. I am entirely at a loss how we might hurry the process since absolutely nothing is relying on us individually. Our lawyer is often AWOL and our mortgage company just moved head offices, leaving thousands of people (including us) in a money lending limbo. Nevertheless, our accents combined with our unwillingness to rush ahead without paperwork in hand have Tim phoning me nearly daily to berate me. Even when I point out that we had all of our paperwork and things together in mid-May and it has since been with our hired help, my foreign-ness is still our undoing. It is the finest example of 1999 British customer service I have come across since we came back.
So, while we're to blame (and I can only imagine the conversations with other people in the chain), our lawyer has all but disappeared. The law firm we've retained is probably the least professional organisation I've ever come across. You can phone, but it is usually engaged (busy). If you do get through, you almost certainly go through to the answerphone. The answerphone message is the standard machine message (you can hear the crackling of the tape as you record), with no reference to the company or phone number... so, as you leave a message about private legal matters, you do so not entirely sure you're not telling some little old lady in Essex. Rather than return calls, they write us letters to ask us questions. The other day, they wrote us a letter. They misspelled 'Dudek' (yep, 5 letters inexplicably became 6) and made a couple of other errors. While they never caught the name misspelled, they did catch the other typos. Yet, rather than reprint the letter, the crossed it out with a ballpoint pen and corrected it above. Yes, we're being charged £50 for stationary and postage.
Meanwhile, our mortgage lending company seems to have checked out for a few weeks to move its head office. Our mortgage broker is perplexed and effusively apologetic. Nevertheless, we're a caught in position with thousands of other of having to wait over 6 weeks for a process that normally takes a few days. Despite having our mortgage broker explain this to Tim, Tim can't help but bring it up daily with the underlying implication being we're somehow in a credit crisis and he ought to kick us out for being too poor.
I think the underlying frustration on all parts is that, apart from this blog and occasionally asking Tim if it would be too much trouble to be polite, we're not biting. After all, "When in Rome." Today, Ange confidently explained to Tim that we were okay with it taking a little longer. We'd waited 4 months, an extra couple of days wasn't going to bother us. Tim's commission is on his mind. He wasn't convinced.
We had some survey work done on the house which discovered a few little but somewhat costly problems with the house. One was a leak in the roof. The other a problem with how the water tanks had been installed. The surveyor was keen to point out that these sort of issues were to be expected in a house of its age (approximately 120 years old). My dad read a copy of the report. He seemed pleased that the house was not about to imminently collapse in on itself and declared the structure fit to buy. Ange and I suggested we share the cost of the repairs with the seller.
Only, suggesting something to the seller isn't an entirely straight-forward procedure. We could go through the Estate Agent. However, as we're not paying them in this transaction and I have every reason to believe they're acting in their interest (i.e. commission) before anything else, we can't go through them. Good old Tim at Bridges is very quick to accuse us of holding up the process. I am entirely at a loss how we might hurry the process since absolutely nothing is relying on us individually. Our lawyer is often AWOL and our mortgage company just moved head offices, leaving thousands of people (including us) in a money lending limbo. Nevertheless, our accents combined with our unwillingness to rush ahead without paperwork in hand have Tim phoning me nearly daily to berate me. Even when I point out that we had all of our paperwork and things together in mid-May and it has since been with our hired help, my foreign-ness is still our undoing. It is the finest example of 1999 British customer service I have come across since we came back.
So, while we're to blame (and I can only imagine the conversations with other people in the chain), our lawyer has all but disappeared. The law firm we've retained is probably the least professional organisation I've ever come across. You can phone, but it is usually engaged (busy). If you do get through, you almost certainly go through to the answerphone. The answerphone message is the standard machine message (you can hear the crackling of the tape as you record), with no reference to the company or phone number... so, as you leave a message about private legal matters, you do so not entirely sure you're not telling some little old lady in Essex. Rather than return calls, they write us letters to ask us questions. The other day, they wrote us a letter. They misspelled 'Dudek' (yep, 5 letters inexplicably became 6) and made a couple of other errors. While they never caught the name misspelled, they did catch the other typos. Yet, rather than reprint the letter, the crossed it out with a ballpoint pen and corrected it above. Yes, we're being charged £50 for stationary and postage.
Meanwhile, our mortgage lending company seems to have checked out for a few weeks to move its head office. Our mortgage broker is perplexed and effusively apologetic. Nevertheless, we're a caught in position with thousands of other of having to wait over 6 weeks for a process that normally takes a few days. Despite having our mortgage broker explain this to Tim, Tim can't help but bring it up daily with the underlying implication being we're somehow in a credit crisis and he ought to kick us out for being too poor.
I think the underlying frustration on all parts is that, apart from this blog and occasionally asking Tim if it would be too much trouble to be polite, we're not biting. After all, "When in Rome." Today, Ange confidently explained to Tim that we were okay with it taking a little longer. We'd waited 4 months, an extra couple of days wasn't going to bother us. Tim's commission is on his mind. He wasn't convinced.
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