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.