Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Family’ Category

Just as there never seems to be a single bus around, so too it seems to be with house buyers.

With the market having slowed down considerably in the UK, selling in markets that are dependent on that market is also pretty slow. However, that seems to be changing as we’ve now had three quite serious house views in the space of two weeks.

Now, if only we can persuade one to part with a large cheque…

We’ve had our place listed with several estate agents for a while now and had sort-of settled into the thinking that it would sell “sometime” but probably not that soon.

These days, you get a lot of “window shoppers” when you’re trying to get a decent price for your place and we’ve had our share of those through normal estate agents.

However, one estate agent that we listed with some time ago and heard nothing from since got in touch last week to see about a visit on Saturday. They’d said at the outset that they pre-vet purchasers to the extent of checking in advance not only what they’re looking for but also that they’ve got the resources to pay for it and made a point of saying that they’d only be around with “serious buyers”.  Total estate-agent speak if ever there was an example of it we thought.

The call was surprising on several fronts. We’d not heard from them in ages so figured that they’d forgotten about us which was a shame as we’d originally thought that they would be the people who’d sell it for us. More surprising in some ways was that the appointment was for Saturday morning: I always figured that estate agents were strictly Monday to Friday people but apparently not.

Although our place is pretty large, usually we’d people round it in maybe an hour and then a little chat afterwards. These people were here well over two hours and were only asking the kind of questions that you’d ask if you were pretty serious about a place: can we buy that land for a pool?, can we build on that section? and so on.

We still don’t know if they’ll buy the place as they’d seen several other places in the area but the estate agent was talking of getting an architect in to see how much the changes they’d like would cost. If they run to that, I think we may need to start preparing for a fairly quick move as they seemed very proactive.

Yeah, I know, boring.

However, interestingly our strategy of simply buying the cheapest available machine nearly four years back and replacing it when it was at the end of its life does appear to have been the correct one. The original one cost us around EUR 200, worked perfectly for over three years and has been replaced with another one at around the same price.

Sounds expensive? Not really. The next one up from both costs nearly 50% more and given the heavy workload we’ve been putting the machine to over the last four years I don’t believe for a minute that it would have lasted any longer.

Now, in theory, we could have gone for the extended warranty but, frankly, I don’t think they’d have honoured the agreement on the basis that we were using it for industrial scale washing (which we were).

Incidently, that extra 50% gets you quite a lot of washing programmes but doesn’t mean that the machine can actually do any more work. If you look along the washing machines on sale near you, you’ll find that all but the very expensive ones can only cope with 5kg loads.

James’ nursery school is in the throes of producing a film based on the Arabian nights tales.

Well, we think it’s on that as James is less than forthcoming about his role in the production beyond mentioning the other day that he had to hand a lamp to two of the other children in his class. We’ve also seen various shapes of swords laid outside for the paint to dry and there was a photo of the little girls in Arabian nights type costumes in the newsletter last week.

Anyway, we’ll know soon as opening night (probably day I expect) is in a few weeks time.

There haven’t been any posts in the last week or so as I was felled by the flu. Isn’t it amazing how such a seemingly trivial thing can still knock all of us out?

Of course, with the relatively cold weather and the school holidays it’s been working it’s way around everyone over the last week.

Still, just about everyone seems to be getting back on their feet again so we’re back to (almost) normal.