A Time of Magic

When you’ve been in a house for a while, you accumulate things.

Whilst it’s not so bad for household items, when you start trying to collect things together in the garage you really need to start considering things like stainless steel drums to avoid all the problems that chemicals can cause very easily.

Of course, once you’ve everything in those drums you may well have the problem that you’ve nowhere left to park the car…

We’re trying to sell a rather unique property at the moment.

That’s clearly more difficult in the current market than it would have been a few years ago and therefore the buyers are that little bit more cautious about it. Essentially they want to know what the property is really worth when previously they’d have taken more of a chance.

Thus, we find ourselves becoming more aware of what it’s really worth as opposed to what we’d like it to be worth. As it happens there isn’t a whole lot of difference in the two figures and we’ve been keeping such a close eye on it that when we got another valuation done by an estate agent to help one of the buyers our own figure was identical to the one that we’d quoted that buyer earlier (no, we didn’t influence the agent: the buyer arranged the agents visit and we never even spoke to them).

The problem is that this particular buyer had started from the premise that he could borrow X, that he’d need to spend Y on various renovations and that therefore he could only pay us X-Y. Unfortunately, that figure is well under what we could accept as even a rock bottom minimum and it turns out it about a third of what the valuation turned up. To say that he’s not a happy bunny is putting it mildly as he’d put quite a bit of time, effort and money into getting all kinds of experts out to assess what it would cost to makeover the property into what he wants and now that’s all been wasted.

It seems like forever that we’ve been intending to get the bathroom updated but we’ve been just too swamped with other things lately to make much progress with it in the last month or two.

We’re actually almost at the stage of getting the builders in for the final quote but need to tidy up a few loose ends so that they can finalise the quote and get started on the work. The problem is that at this stage you start thinking about things like a Toto toilet and thus get yourself diverted into considering a slightly different look than we’d originally started with.

I think we just need to sit down, go through the catalogue and list everything now!