Snafu.org.uk

I’ve finally found the time to write a catch up blog post! As you can probably guess from the last blog posts I made, things have been pretty busy. So, to summarise:

Had a baby

Daniel is getting big now and doing his best to destroy the house! He’s discovered crawling and so now nothing is safe. He’s also figured out how to pull himself upright on furniture, so I suspect it won’t be too long before he’s tottering about the place. There are various pictures of the little blighter in the gallery

Moved house

This took a lot longer than we thought it would, though thankfully we sold just before every started getting really nervous about the housing market. The estate agents were pretty rubbish (Ward and Partners), sending round people who were totally unsuitable for our house. Talking to friends this doesn’t seem uncommon for Wards, so try and avoid them where possible. The person we sold was planning to rent it, and seemed to have a number of other properties but seemed to have a hell of a job sorting out her mortgage properly which meant she overran the completion date. All fairly stressful for us as this was happening around Christmas and New Year, however it finally went through in the end and the house is sold.
This means we’re now back living in Canterbury, which is great. Much better for work if nothing else as a 10 minute commute is much better than 40 minutes+. Also this house is bigger and more conventionally laid out than the Margate house which means furniture fits better and is much more child friendly.

Other than that(!), everything is much the same. Which is probably for the best actually as that’s kept us flatout for the best part of a year

We’ve recently started the process of selling our house. Even though we’re not likely to move till the end of the year we figure that we’re going to be so busy once the baby arrives we may as well get started beforehand when we have a little more time.

We started by getting an agent round at the weekend to look the house over and do a valuation. He seemed pretty switched on and keen about selling the house so we decided to use his agency (which will remain nameless at the moment ) We agreed that the house would start being marketed in a couple of weeks as we need to do some bits to it, tidy it and sort the garden out.

Claire was therefore a little surprised to get a barrage of phone calls this morning from the estate agents. Firstly one wanted to visit the house to have a look round and gave a whole 10 minutes notice. She spent the time looking down her nose at the place (well, we did warn them…) before pretending (badly) that she liked it. I’m sure after a 10 minute visit she’ll be able to sell the house better…

Later on she then got a call off another agent who had a builder who was desperate to see the house. We agreed that he could show he round, even though we’re still a little annoyed that they’ve started flogging the place already. The estate agent turned up first, and my God, was he ever the stereotype. Sunglasses (even though it was going dark) and annoying personality. Again he obviously hated the house (I expect he’s more a designer flat type of guy) but did his best to pretend to be positive. The actual viewing went fine (though the builder had a rather nice MG so he’s obviously not planning to live round here ) and he didn’t seem to think much of the agent either. I suspect we won’t get any offer as the agents are selling the place as 3 bedroom (when it’s blatantly 2, unless you fancy sleeping in the cellar) for some reason and so it makes the house appear bigger than it is and is probably attracting the wrong type of interest.

Oh well, hopefully they will shape up a little more as they go on.

We were less than impressed today when we left the house to do some shopping and found that some idiot had crashed in the back of our car. The boot is totally stoved in and the bumper hanging off so we didn’t fancy risking driving it. Whoever did it didn’t bother leaving a note or anything, even though judging by the damage to our car theirs must be in a real state. Makes you wonder whether it was one of the 12,000 uninsured drivers that leave the scene of accident without leaving details.

Tesco insurance, who we only just switched to, seemed very efficient in sorting out a courtesy car and repair of our car, though we have to wait till Monday for anything to happen. All in all it’ll only cost us £50, which is our excess, but it’s still a pain in the arse we could do without. We suspect it was one of the pillocks that do 60 down our road (which is a 30), couldn’t stop and slid into our car.

It’s only when you don’t have a car that you begin to sympathise with the people complaining about town centre shops shutting. Luckily we have a somerfield within 10 minutes walk, but if that wasn’t there all the big supermarkets and shops are a couple of miles away outside of town.

Hopefully we’ll get a sensible courtesy car on Monday and not some stupid tiny thing where I can push all the pedals with one foot Have to wait and see I guess.

We had a card through the door the other day saying that we needed to contact British Gas so they could do an urgent safety inspection of out meter. From previous visits I know this is a load of bollox as the only part of the meter they inspect are the numbers showing how much gas we’ve used. They just want to make sure we haven’t been fiddling them.
Anyway, I phoned the 24 hour automated service only to be told it’s open Monday - Friday 8 till 8… Still, it bodes well for the 24 hour cover they keep wanting to bring in at work

As is painfully obvious I’m sure, I’ve changed the website. The main reason for this is that I’ve moved away from Blogger to Wordpress, which gives me much more control and frankly Blogger has been running like a dog recently.

I’m slowly moving the content over as Blogger was resisting the import script with all it’s might The extra pages will follow once I’ve got the main blog content done. Comments may be lost forever, but I might manage to retrieve them at some point.