first, cup

Uploaded 18/07/2010
Development imperfection-blobs and scratches courtesy of Trumps, Clerk St, Edinburgh

After a second visit to the initial target house we popped to Spoon to check it out after its nomination as the location for a non-mosque-kitchen blipmeet next week and to do some budgeting and sums to check that making an offer on the initial target house was both feasible and wise. In its basic state it was certainly affordable but this was mostly due to the basic state being quite similar to the basic state of the house shortly after it was built shortly before the outbreak of the second world war. The floors were original, mostly exposed and generally good and the loft had been recently insulated but everything would have needed some redecoration and there would have to have been some fairly major reworking of the kitchen, possibly the adjacent room and definitely the rudimentary porch which housed the electric oven, the fridge and a general air of dampness and decrepitude. Despite the work required it was still coming in under budget, and despite the need for redecoration and more modernisation than the limited amount thereof to which it had already been subjected it was still doable in order to end up with something inhabitable before the middle of May, though it would require staying in the flat until any rebuilding was complete to avoid the close proximity of either a pregnant woman or a newborn baby to large amounts of the levels of dust only the removal of lath and plaster walls can bring about.

In the end we made an offer which was accepted and which we had the finances to back up, but some severe dragging of feet on the bequarters of the lender, the broker and both sets of solicitors who seemed particularly disinclined to speak to each other via any method swifter than horse-drawn mailcoach meant that the selling solicitor withdrew and accepted another offer a couple of days before we got the call from the lender saying that they'd finally completed our application following the previous few days' arse-in-gear requests which were usually responded to with the news that their deal was so amazingly brilliant that it was massively over-subscribed and that they'd had to pull loads of overtime to get all the applications administered. Nicky pleaded slightly with the seller (as she also had to do with the seller of the second target house we eventually bought when it looked like the same thing was going to happen a second time) with the result that we eventually received a discreet tip-off that another house nearby was about to become available though by the time we went for a look the second house's transactions were nearly complete.