Week 4

As Jean-Paul Satre said, “Hell is other people”.

Starting with the good news, the Homebuyer’s Report came back on the place I’m buying, and it was pretty clean. I’ll need to get a bit of moss scraped off the roof and the loft insulation could do with beefing up.

So I get my solicitor on the phone and say “shall we exchange contracts next week?”

The answer comes back that my buyer is now the only reason why not.

Yes, the same buyer who was desperate to get things done by September to align with getting his sprog in school locally. Apparently:

  • His first choice of solicitor left the firm, and this resulted in my solicitor having to send all the documents again. Clearly this ace law firm just burns all post addressed to anyone who quits as there’s no reason to suppose their work will be taken over by someone else.
  • He’s receiving money from relatives abroad to help with the deposit, and has yet to convince his bank of the provenance of such. Given the hoops I had to jump through about gifts from family in the UK back in 2014, I shudder to think how he’s going to convince some call centre idiot that he’s not an international money launderer.
    • The net result of which is that we’re five weeks in and he doesn’t have a mortgage offer yet, though he has at least had the lender’s survey and has allegedly started his searches.

Bottom line, my plans for the weekend: