An Englishman's Home


And so our flat has gone on the market!
 We made the very difficult choice of estate agents and put it on the market. This morning, the first full day on the market the estate  agent has been on the phone twice to arrange two viewings.  So it’s probably a good job that I’m regarding today as the first day of my two-week Easter holiday. A decision I made last week when I looked in the diary and saw that I had no more work until Tuesday, May 3. Like the rest of the country my time over the next 14 days has been torn apart by the glut of bank holidays. I suppose a lot of people are rejoicing in the four-day three-day four-day week thing that is upon us. For those people who have to reach their work targets whatever, no matter how many days in the week, the next three weeks will  be the cause of a lot of extra work. I can’t see why the mandarins of Whitehall who arrange Howd the date for Kate, oops sorry, Princess Catherine as we should refer to her now , and Wills marriage couldn’t have chosen a time away from all the prearranged bank holidays so that our day of celebration for the Royal wedding would be a day of joy not just part of an all too unneeded four day weekend.
 Anyway back to the flat viewings. It felt very strange to suddenly see our home, the place we have built together over the last 6+ years publicly strewn over the Internet on the website of our estate agent. A bit of an invasion of privacy. The photos are great, and scream out to me that is a nice place to live, but at the moment it’s my place to live….. our place…. And I’m not sure how I’ll feel about people coming to look around.
I know when we have been going to see places part of me feels rather prurient as I see people’s personal belongings up close in a house that I know nothing about, and the other half of me wonders around the place dispassionately criticising. The fact that  people are about to do that to our home  I find very disturbing.
The ideal situation is just to leave the estate agent the keys and let them get on with it, and once we have more trust in our estate agents I’m sure we will.
 Give the saga of bad treatment that we received from estate agents in our search for a home,  at the moment I wouldn’t trust somebody with my address, let alone my keys.
They’d been on the phone twice this morning to arrange two viewings. One was 10:30 AM and considering that I decided to have a lie in and didn’t get up until  9:55 AM that one is now being rearranged. The other is at 12:15 PM. The girl I spoke to on the phone is called Fay. She hasn’t as yet been round to see the flat, so I’m interested in how she’ll show a flat that she’s never seen before to two prospective buyers.  As you may have read in my blog last week, this was the failing of Sam in Beckenham. If I had been the vendor in his case I would have told him to pop back to his office, rip upthe contract and not show his face again. Let’s hope we don’t have cause for a similar reaction when we watch Fay  conduct  a viewing.
We’ve seen one little house that we quite liked, but I’m not sure whether we can afford it will stop there are several other on the market that it will be worth is looking at and in between opening chocolate eggs I’m sure that’s what we’ll be doing over Easter. Looking  for our next home,  our next castle, and by definition the next stage of our relationship. As Rich said over the weekend  “it’s a new beginning” and indeed it is. I just want to be sure that our current existence is attractive enough that somebody will pay the asking price.
 Here’s hoping that our home is good enough to be somebody else’s castle!



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