Becoming 2nd Homeless

Chapter 1, How not to buy a house:

Pay slightly more than you could have paid for a house 5 years ago.

Get pregnant and decide you need a bigger house.

Try to sell your current house off and on at various prices for the best part of two years.

Give up and decide to rent out your house and borrow money from the bank of mum and dad, which can eventually be paid back once the house does sell.

Have an offer accepted on a house (Jan 2016)

Don't specifically ask if the property is leasehold (it is, which means £350 extra a year in ground rent and maintenance charges)

Listen to a mortgage advisor who said "the new stamp duty laws coming in in April for people who own two houses won't apply to you"

Don't be particularly quick about things.

Find out a few days before the law comes in that the law will apply to you. E.g. you owe an extra £5000

Realise you can basically never buy another house.

Get bailed out by the bank of mum and dad again.

Listen to the estate agent who says "you can exchange on 27th May" and don't specifically tell her to inform our solicitors of that date.

Arrange for tenants to move into your current house on 31st May.

Spend ages making a lamp for the new house out of spray painted coconuts.

Buy a Dobbies loyalty card as we'll be living just round the corner from it.

Chapter 2, - Becoming homeless

About 10 days ago we were in the situation of not definitely but hopefully moving house on the 28th May and being led to believe that, if the paperwork was not complete in time, it would be complete some time in the next week. As the tenants were moving into ours this meant we may have had to briefly be housed by our families for few days, which wasn't ideal as we'd have to move all of our stuff into storage for a few days, but no major problem.

Then 3 days before the day we were meant to be getting the keys, we were told "the woman doesn't want to move out yet, she would be ok to move out in another month" and apparently the paperwork will take "a few more weeks"

So initially this was a bit of a shock and we were both thinking, ok, let's drop out because we can't let this woman mess us around like this and who knows when it will actually happen.

We've always talked a lot about moving abroad I actually can't believe we haven't done it yet. We went on our big two month trip cycling through Europe and the middle east in 2013 - this was an adventure to help us decide where we wanted to be, and although we had a lot of fun and went to some brilliant places we missed our community of friends in Liverpool. So we decided let's stay here for a while and "settle down" whatever that means. Since then we've been tempted by sunnier places a few times, but we told ourselves when we get a bigger house, or when the weather gets warmer, we'll feel better about staying. So this whole house situation has opened up all of these questions again.

Is buying a house a bit too normal? We have considered buying a pub, a shop, a house boat and a canal boat. I've got a friend who lives in a converted horse box and he is living the dream.

There wasn't a lot of time for the "what do we want from life?" questions because there was the more pressing question of "where are we going to live next week?"

Moving was hard work. Percy coped quite well with lots of different people coming in and out of the house and boxes everywhere but then when it came to catching the rabbit to take her away to Rachel's house he burst into tears. In the end we had to go to Rachel's to see the rabbit settle in for Percy to be happy.

On my last night in the house we were reminiscing about our first night in the house nearly 5 years ago when we came back from honeymoon and it was the 2011 riots and we could see it all from our window. Aww good times.

The night we left our house.

Don't worry little sunflower one day we'll get you a garden.

Chapter 3 - the adventures start here.

So I'm currently doing a UK tour. First we visited Granny and Grandad in Coventry. For some reason they do anything Percy asks them to do, like in the picture below, where Percy asked them to do headstands. Later on he made them swim like dogs in the swimming pool.

Then we went to stay with Aunty Sarah in her student house in Southampton. Dan is living in Southport with his parents because he needs to be near work. In a few days time we will be moving in with the crazy Langston family who have three kids, plus other lodgers, and live in a house which I think used to be 12 one-bed flats. I'm quite looking forward to that, I think it will be fun.

So what shall we do with our lives? Here are some options:

1) Stop being so dramatic and just move into the house whenever it's ready
2) Buy or rent another house in Liverpool. Percy has helped us design a new house, it even has a mezzanine level and a helicopter pad.

3) Find a job in the Isle of Wight and then buy a houseboat
4) Move to France or Spain
5) Move somewhere really far like Australia or New Zealand or the Cook Islands for a year. (Dan actually emailed someone about a possible 2 year job in the Cook Islands fairly recently.)
6) Buy a zoo in Wales with our friends the Hawkridges... We need more people to get in on this plan though so if you're that rare breed of person that's rich but fun then why not join us?

http://www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-52246214.html

P.s. I could have made this blog more funny but I'm saving my jokes for some stand up comedy I'm doing on 8th June, at 8pm, at the Lantern Theatre, £4.

A crazy man called Joe

This weekend we drove over 500 miles with a toddler to attend the wedding of Joe and Katie Fredrick. There’s a lot of people we wouldn’t make that much effort for but Joe Fred (as he is known) is a very special friend to us. (We don’t know Katie as well but from what we know of her she is absolutely brilliant fun and a wonderful match for Joe.)

We first met Joe Fred back in 2011 when he came to Liverpool for Uni. 2011 was the year we got married and during that year we were running a group called studio which was for people who went to our church and were interested in the arts. We mainly went to a load of different arts events together, a lot of them were questionable, one of them once involved a performance piece where a woman was wearing absolutely nothing but a pair of red heels and a rubber horse’s head. It was through going to these random things that we got into the Liverpool alternative comedy scene, which we’re still involved with.

Joe is one of the funniest people ever to be around, he is full of crazy ideas and is not afraid to be a non-conformist. Maybe that’s why we get on well. He also loves a deep discussion and cannot be bothered with small talk. Joe and I share a love of bargains and living frugally. In my student days I once lived on £5 a week for food for a month. Joe went through a stage of trying to live without money by trying to do everything for swaps, he managed to get a gym to give him free membership by making them a promotional video, I think he did the same with a pizza place. He would go to far away weddings without booking himself overnight accommodation and then blagging his way in to sleep in other couples en-suite bathrooms.

I love it when people just drop in at our house unannounced and he did that a lot. Sometimes it was when he was just walking past. Once he was locked out and ending up sleeping on our sofa bed and once he phoned us to say “could I use your microwave? I’ve been trying to defrost my mince in a tumble dryer but it’s not really working.”

Joe wearing a suit jacket, a hoody and shorts, carrying a saw and methylated sprits.

One of the best parties I ever went to was Joe Fred's no electricity party. He filled his and his next door neighbour's alley with candles and we had a stage made of bricks where our friend Alex played the cello and Joe performed with his acoustic rap band. I also did a breeze block sculpting workshop. I’d share a picture but only film photography was allowed.

2 years ago Joe got together with the lovely Katie, she was mad enough to consider living in a yurt in Kent with him. In the end they moved down there and are in the process of buying a house. (I know how normal of them, I’m sure they’ll make it wacky though.)

Joe is from a farming family so his wedding was farm themed. The wedding car was a tractor and the reception was in a barn. 

Not one of those posh converted barns that people pay a lot of money for. Their actual barn, with their actual dogs running around, made beautiful by Joe’s brother.  My favourite bit was when we were at the reception and they said "please welcome the bride and groom" and everyone looked at the entrance between the hay bales but then above the hay bales they appeared in the scooper bit of a digger.

We kept trying to teach Percy to say "Katie and Joe" but as he already knows another couple called "Katie and Mike" he kept saying that.

We had to do a lot of breaking up the journey for Percy. Before the wedding we stopped off at my parents house and at a random park in Leatherhead. After the wedding we got to see my Auntie Hilary and her family. Then we stopped at my favourite childhood park in Warwick and then at my parents house again, and I am writing this on the way back to Liverpool. Percy fell asleep in his normal way - chatting himself to sleep. Tonight he said "watch telly watch telly watch telly watch ...toes. where toes where toes.....granny. Ice cream." *a bit of crying* sleep.

Night night everyone.

Big news

I'm going to be doing a 1 hour 1 woman show in the Liverpool comedy festival! It's on September, 27th, you should come!

It came about quite easily really... we went to the Edinburgh festival in 2014, it was like my last chance to live a studenty life style of staying up late and sleeping on floors and stuff, 2 months before I became a mum. People have asked me "do you want to do an Edinburgh show" and I would, but it would be pretty impossible to just go and live in Edinburgh for a month with a small child and it would be a bit rubbish for Dan if he had to quit his job to come and then had to babysit every night. That's not really going to happen. So my friend Alastair who has done several years of Edinburgh shows said "why don't you do the Liverpool comedy festival?" which is a single one hour show and the main benefit is: it's in Liverpool.

So I chatted about it to a couple of my performingy friends (Esther, Danni, Rob and Lee) and Danni said "just book it in and it will make you do it." Nothing's more motivating than being given a date where you'll be publicly humiliated if you don't come up with some funny stuff. So I emailed this guy. I had to give a title and a blurb, he said it was oversubscribed so I wasn't sure if I would get in, but I did!

No idea what will be in the show really but here's the title and blurb:

Hannah Jones: Best Days of Your Life

School days are the best days of your life, if you die at 16 and can’t remember before 4.

Blending the everyday with the surreal, comedian Hannah Jones remembers surviving school in the 90s as a dyslexic ginger.

“Whimsical” and “lovely” comedy, this is group therapy for those who were never cool enough to sit on the back seat of the bus.