So, after 8 months of living in the flat on Kelvin Grove (and by flat we mean about 500 usable square feet), we decided it was time to start living like civilized people. The house hunt began again. After learning that rentals only stay on the market for 24-48 hours after they are first listed, Debbie got busy finding homes that had just been listed. She stumbled across this one on Halifax Street, about 4 hours after it was listed; a viewing was arranged for the next day. By the time we had our viewing, there had already been one prior and one more scheduled later that day; so we had to move quickly. Turns out, that this London version of the Winchester Mystery House was/is quite popular. We put in an offer immediately (yes, you make offers for leases in London as if you were buying, and then there is a negotiation process – bizarre, we originally thought you would just pay the listed price). At any rate, we won the bidding war!
There is a sad element to all of this and an element of inspiration. We were so filled with hope and energy to tackle “living in a flat in London” when we first arrived. As time went on, those 500 square feet got smaller and smaller. Move-in Day was exciting and different and full of promise. Move-out Day took forever to get here. But it turned out to be one of the best days of our entire time in England so far. Our new house with its odd stairs, short ceilings, hobbit holes, small passageways, pink walls, holes, broken tiles, decaying brick, dirty carpet, ripped wallpaper, and electrical and gas hazards, was to become our proper London respite. We walked in with the keys on day 1 and knew we were “home” – with all of its problems, it just felt right. We love the new house, but it was an ordeal beyond anything we expected to get here.
Backtracking a few weeks, the time came to prepare for moving – to do so, we needed to break our current lease 4 months early. That turned out to be the easiest part of what we would have to do to get out of the flat. Everything was set, we had a move in date, we had new furniture on the way to the new house, and we were ready for the big day – July 9. That is when all hell started breaking loose (and by “all hell” we mean a rapidly growing hatred for our then current landlords and an unravelling list of problems with the new house).
Leaving Kelvin Grove
About 4 days before we were set to move out of the old place, we get a note from the Landlord asking for the copy of the receipt from the professional window and carpet cleaners we hired. What? We didn’t hire any professionals – we vacuumed and cleaned the windows ourselves. Through a series of emails between Jon and Psycho Landlord Twin #1, we determined that the team of Psycho Landlord Twins would not release our £1500 deposit unless we hired these professionals. At this point we demanded to see the receipt from the equivalent professional cleaning that was done before we moved in (as we would not return the flat to them in any better shape than it was when we moved in).
“Oh, you never got that receipt?”
“No, and we will need to see that before we order a professional carpet cleaner”
“Well, you’d best arrange for that now as we don’t want to have to charge you for lost rent if the receipt is not available to us by July 9.”
What the hell? We had nothing in the lease indicating that this was a requirement, and no proof that it was ever done before we moved in. But the Psycho Twins had us pinned to the wall to the tune of £1500. Fine, we’ll order the f-ing carpet and window cleaner. Ok, done.
“You know, there are some extra weeds in the garden. We will need to hire a professional gardener to tidy up”, said psycho #2.
“Oh and the hole in our attic that was there before you moved in lets moths in. That is a problem and we’ll have to fumigate, which you will have to pay for”, said psycho #1.
“Oh, and there is a bit of dust on the floorboard in the kitchen, so we must have a full cleaning crew in and you will have to pay for that”, said the psychos in unison.
As our readers will hopefully know, we are not messy people and keep a very clean house. Needless to say, we vehemently disagreed on all points, especially the weeds in the garden (since their garden was a disaster when we moved in) and the fumigation at our expense because they have a structural problem with the building. It’s not like we hung out a neon sign saying “All moths welcome” – AND, we had to live with those stupid moths for 3 months. The psychos are apparently not smart enough to realize that killing any moths that might exist (of which there were none because we had already fumigated 2 months prior) will not plug the gaping hole in their attic where all creatures great and small can get in.
At the risk of carrying on too long about this (we know, “too late already”), suffice it say that we had to pay almost £600 just to get our deposit back. After discussing all of this with the letting agent, we learned that these psychos are just that – bipolar psychos. We could have filed a claim and fought the whole thing in court, but we opted to go British-passive instead of British-aggressive, unlike the psycho twins.
Halifax, the New Day Dawns
Since the new house was unfurnished and the old one completely furnished, we had a new problem to tackle, but it was one to which we looked forward. Knowing that all of our furniture is gathering dust in a storage unit in Los Angeles, we went furniture shopping. It took only one stop at one store to realize that furnishing an entire house in England requires a promissory note from Lloyds of London. Hmmm. What to do? Plan B – Debbie found one of the charity shops for the British Heart Foundation that had just opened a new used furniture location. We went and they had good quality furniture at a fraction of the cost of new stuff. We bought couches, dressers, tables, chairs, microwave, television, DVD player, surround sound system, and tried to buy their kitchen sink, but it was not for sale. They waved the £30 delivery charge since we bought so much stuff. We decided that the beds and mattresses had to be brand new – so we bought them at a furniture store that has since disappeared (it was burned down in the London Riots in August – yikes).
As we noted, we walked in the door at Halifax and a great sense of peace came over us. Long gone were the tribulations of living in a small box, walking up and down those 17 stairs every day, just to get to the front door; we were standing in what felt like a real home, full of warmth and a return of hope and promise. We knew we were in the right place – a place we cared more about and would be proud to call our own. So we set about checking out the property to see which of the repairs had been completed. Total count = zero! Are you kidding? We signed the lease three weeks prior and nothing had been done. Wow, loss for words. Undaunted, we decided to get the cameras rolling (because we will get 100% of our deposit back on this place come hell or high water!). After 63 photos of problem spots and an email to the new landlord to politely say WTF?, we stopped and marvelled that even with the items that needed repair, we were still so much happier; happy enough that the problems just really didn’t matter in the grand scheme of things. There is a big difference between a hole in the ceiling and a hole in your spirit – a good lesson to learn.
So we set about actually moving our stuff from the old place to the new place [note: the flat and the house are only 2 blocks away from each other, so we were able to move everything by loading it into suitcases and rolling those suitcases back and forth between the properties]. We also got started on “painting the pink room” – one of the bedrooms had been used by a little girl prior to our tenancy and it was painted in two-tone hot pink – yowza! We had secured permission from the Landlord to paint it. Debbie began the masking tape and tarping process and Jon made some round trips between the flat and house to cart more stuff over (8 trips in all that day).
It's Only a Flesh Wound
Not feeling like painting and not wanting to cart more stuff over, we decided to unpack our kitchen stuff. Plus our furniture was scheduled to arrive in about 30 minutes. We had been on an IKEA trip to get all of the dinnerware, pots/pans, silverware, etc. for our new kitchen and now we were about to start having fun opening all the packages and configuring this great new kitchen (which is 3 times the size of the old one). One of the items we got at IKEA was a really good knife – we’d been trying to saw through bread, onions, and tomatoes for months with our rented knives, so we were excited to finally have a really good one. Turns out the knife was hermetically sealed in its packaging and required a team of 10 people to get the knife out. As a fan of the figure-out-this-packaging challenge, Jon figured out how to get the knife out – simply yank on it as hard as you can and cut a 5 cm deep gash in your index finger. Brilliant! Jon is standing there bleeding profusely with a huge gash in his finger – looks like it will need 15 stitches at least! Debbie gets on the phone to the doctor’s office hot line and finds out that Jon needs to go to “A&E” (Accidents and Emergencies), the UK name for an ER. Closest one is at Lewisham Hospital. No worries, it just a 25 minute bus ride and a 10 block walk – shouldn’t everyone travel to the ER with blood loss via bus? Debbie couldn’t go with Jon because there were two delivery companies scheduled to arrive with a house full of furniture in 15 minutes. So, we kissed and agreed to reconvene back in a fully furnished house with a fully stitched finger. The whole ER experience was different, not bad at all, but different. It only took 2 hours, including round trip transportation and Jon will only have a small scar. Upon his return home, the house was furnished (except the new beds had to be assembled and we only had three working hands between us!). Still, we were so happy to be in the new house – really, we were (and still are).
And now for the pictures
The first journey we took her on was to Knole Estate. We rented a car while she was here, so we drove there instead of taking the bus to the Southern Rail to London Bridge to connect to Southeastern Rail to Sevenoaks, followed by a 2 mile walk to the Estate. Mum was most appreciative. Knole estate is a beautiful jewel in the British crown (not the actual crown) where the fallow deer run free and hills roll on for days. Mum viewed the whole estate from the comfort of her rolling chair and the deer were very friendly to her (and so was her "driver"):
