Home is Where the Heartache is ...

... and the backache!

We've all been there.  Young, penniless and dreaming of the day when we finally can afford a place to call our own.  I did the Uni thing and got the job of my dreams only to be bitterly disappointed that the pay was so poor and the hope of ever rising through the ranks was equally as disheartening.  'Stuck in a rut', as some people put it, my dreams of owning a pretty little house in a quaint little rural village were as realistic as suddenly being promoted to CEO or winning the lottery (which I didn't play anyway as I didn't have the money for a ticket).   I was sentenced for an indeterminable amount of time to renting a room from strangers for my crimes ... and boy were some of them strange!  There was the landlady with a unhealthy obsession with Paddington Bear and the landlord who broke up with his partner and played Simon & Garfunkel very loudly, on repeat,  every evening .... for months!

At this time I was going through difficult personal issues and was pretty much all by myself (Eric Carmen singing in my head like my own little life narration).  I went to a nice quack who told me to change one thing in my life and everything else will follow.  So I took up bellydancing (yes stay with me it gets better).  This propelled me from tubby, shy, tearful little recluse to fit and confident super woman that people wanted to be around (Eric Carmen being replaced with Meredith Brooks in the mind of this protagonist).  This made me noticeable to some of my colleagues who in turn offered me a much better living arrangement.  One of these 'roomies' had a birthday, which was organised into a big house party.  In passing I invited my friend JB, who turned up with lots of wine, which caused me to perform some of my famous bellydancing routines much to JB's amusement.  This was the start of Joolz and JB.  The convenient thing was JB already owned a flat.  I moved in, we were married within 18 months .... and BAM! I was a homeowner.  

To have and to hold .... the deeds!

You may now think of me as a shrewd money grabbing gold-digger.  Well shrewd yes, but as JB worked at the same place I did the rest of the description is a mute point.  As happy as we were the little flat was not my dream house, our dream house, no go back to MY dream house because JB would have been happy living in the flat until the sun burnt out.  

Two years later and two new, better paid jobs later (one for each of us) we decided to look into buying a house.  The problem was that the UK had just nosedived into an economic crisis, we were at the start of a recession and house prices had fallen.  Now if you weren't planning on moving and had entered into one of those dodgy looking Tracker mortgages you were laughing all the way to the 'now quietly sobbing into their cheap beer' bank.  Our present (tracker) mortgage had gone from £900 per month to £200 per month and was decreasing monthly.  Whereas before we found it near impossible to find a steady fixed rate mortgage we could now find them everywhere at an extortionate 7-8% APR on average (suddenly the Tracker mortgage that the banks had told millions were there best option were now unavailable)  Compared to our less then 1% APR mortgage making a move at that time could have been a costly mistake.  Then there was selling the flat.  The flat price had fallen to what it was when it was bought in 2006.  We decided to go for it.  The flat was jointly owned with JB's little brother so we passed over this 'financial gift' to him and his family to live in return for the freedom to pay over the odds for 'The Dream'.  

Many would say I'm meticulous when my head is in the game.  I knew what I wanted and I wasn't going to settle ........ knowingly.  We must have looked at over 60 brochures and seen 30 houses.  With each one we gave an in depth review back to the estate agent.   I was pretty chuffed when JB was told by the estate agent that we gave the most detailed feedback .... ever!  We were given an initial estimated borrowing figure of £220,000 with a 10% deposit.  This was enough to afford one of the lower end nice houses in the nice areas.  When we came to appointing a financial adviser we discovered that the banks were no longer lending as much.  The figure had been reduced to £180,000 with £15% deposit.  This now severely reduced our options, which were now 1) small house with small garden and on-road parking in nice-ish area, or 2) dilapidated old house in 'up and coming family area' with good sized unkempt garden and off-road parking.  Due to my background of living in building sites I persuaded JB to go for option 2.

Browsing through the local rag I came across a sweet looking little bungalow for sale.   At the viewing I noticed how uncared for this house was.  One of the last bungalows in the street that hadn't been built up and ripped in half to make two houses.  Dwarfed by it's neighbours it reminded me of a Disney cartoon I used to watch as a kid called the 'Little House'

Walt Disney's 'The Little House' (1952)

I needed to save this little bungalow, bring it back to life.  With off road parking and a large garden it had potential which I wanted it to fulfil.  Looking back at that moment I may have been inspired by too many episodes of 'Homes Under The Hammer' because ambition and reality are two different things! 

After moving day it soon became apparent that the previous owner was a callous and evil cow. Firstly, she made me (3 months pregnant - yes she knew) and JB sleep in a grotty motel for 2 weeks, even though the house was empty, because she wanted to store her sons cars on the driveway for a bit.  Secondly, she had obviously limited her elderly mother into the use of only 3 rooms so she could store all her and her sons crap for months on end (he was selling his house opposite).  The history is a complicated one, told by neighbours.  Her mother was a gentle frail lady in her 90's who died a few months before the house came up for sale.  Her grandson was an electrician with a client base of multiple commercial companies.  The woman who sold us the house was a domineering local busybody with an agenda.  Upon looking at the house in finer detail this is what we found:

a) Most of the windows were single glazed apart from those visible to passers by
b) The house was freezing and the central heating system was a mystery wrapped in an enigma (if we turned it off at the timer the radiator in the hallway was still boiling hot and if we turned off all the radiators individually water leaked through the kitchen ceiling - also, the timer was in the loft)
c) Even though there was an electrician in the previous family the wiring was a death trap (as one British Gas electrician 'shockingly' discovered - although he didn't want to say anything because he thought we did it!), the gas and water pipes were not earthed and in the one cold bedroom the old lady was confined to a dodgy looking mains cable was shooting up from the floor and connected to a dodgy circuit box, which blew frequently (but it was ok because the previous owners had put a curtain across it - ??) 
d) The chimneys were dangerous and had to be removed.  This caused me some distress as they went through two rooms each and all that dust meant I had to move back with my parents for 3 weeks!!  
e) The 'new kitchen' was a half arsed attempt because the walls were partially skimmed and painted over, the cupboards didn't have any back boards (revealing brick - no plaster) and the tiling under the cupboards was halted where your eye line fell.  There were boards missing and we eventually got a rat in the kitchen - I called him Sir Squeaksalot.  
f) You can move the garage wall if you lean on it.
g) The bath had no shower just a plastic attachment.  It was near impossible to get the water at the right temperature and there was little pressure.  The old lady would have either had to have a freezing 'shower' or a scolding hot one. 
f) Sections of the garden revealed that the previous owners had buried large quantities of rubble such as glass, cement and asbestos.  
g)  90% of the ceilings had polystyrene tiles - a serious fire spreading hazard.
h) The bathroom window was single glazed and someone had just painted over the rotten wood.

This is all I can remember at this moment but I know there was more.  Neighbours say the previous owner treated her mother appallingly and it showed in the house that was left behind.  The previous owner also failed to notify us that one of our neighbours had been given planning permission to build 4 two storey houses which would overlook our garden.  These plans did not come up on the online public records (conspiracy) in 2009 and our solicitor was unaware of it (negligence).  The previous owner DID know about it as further investigations revealed she had sent two letters of complaint to the council (unfortunately this did not all come to light until the neighbours began building in 2011).  Well karma got her in the end as she died suddenly, 6 months after taking our money.

So after 3 years, 1 huge renovation, 1 mains cable moved, 1 completely new boiler system, 2 less chimneys, 1 almost dead electrician, 2 confused plumbers, 3 large skips, 1 new bathroom window,  1 new alarm system, 4 less overgrown trees, 100 tins of paint, a ton of backbreaking labour and about £20K invested our house still looks nothing like the polished houses on the TV. I wasn't expecting 'Grand Designs' but I wasn't expecting to bring into the world two tiny monsters hell bent on destruction.  The other big surprise was 'the up and coming family area' is actually a quaint little road surrounded by old and overpopulated run down council housing from every decade.  Strange thing was on my first day working in the courts we had a murder trial ongoing where the victim lived two roads away from me and she was murdered ten minutes from my house ..... great area!  Estate agents call my road the 'nice part of [sub-district of Reading]'

Ah well!  This is a lesson learnt:  TV LIES!!!  Well for our part the lesson is that you have to be a certain type of person to take on such a responsibility.  How my dad did it all by himself for 20 years I do not know.  After 3 years I have had enough, I can't keep up with the effect of the passing of time on this place.  We fix one thing and something else crumbles.  Recently I spent a lot of time carefully redecorating and tiling the bathroom, making sure that the room was a haven of peace and tranquillity ...... and two months after making everything perfect I fell through the bath!!  

For now we'll just stick to carving out the shell of our home until the children leave and then we can redecorate our little house to showroom standard ....... just in time for the grandkiddies arrival - *sigh*.    

Sayonana, Joolz x

p.s. sorry for the time-gap between blogs.  I was caught up in the Olympics and then had a week come-down from the Olympics where I was losing the will to network but then I remembered the Paralympics starts next week so I am all happy and bloggy again :) x