Living on Hope

This month is a bit of a difficult month, nothing really horrendous, just the stress of selling and it is all very tiresome. It is not a great start to a blog, but I suppose this is what moving life is all about.

As you know, we accepted an offer on our house and now we are going through the hideous English process of selling said house, where nothing happens for weeks, you keep hounding the solicitors, the estate agent hounds all in the chain, the solicitors asks random questions that could have been sorted out weeks ago, then hopefully, with any luck, all of a sudden, it is all go.

We are not at the “all go” stage yet but we have to keep working like it is, just in case it suddenly kicks off.

What has happened is, we have agreed a completion date of 30th November with all concerned, but this is not definite until we exchange contracts, even then something can happen to mess it all up. Guess what? There is something that is messing it up. There is a charge on the Land Registry against our house by a bank for a secured loan that was paid off years ago, but they didn’t remove the charge. So at this moment in time, there doesn’t seem to be a sign of exchanging contracts, never mind completion of our sale, until the bank in question clears it. I recommend that everyone visits the Land Registry site, look up your house and buy the Title Register for £3 to make sure any charges that are listed should be there. At least you can fix it before you decide to sell. So there is no definite answer of completion on the 30th November. We definitely shouldn’t book our transport for our belongings to Scalea, but we have, and we can’t book our one way tickets for our flights, we actually haven’t yet but prices are increasing daily.

We are in the process of packing away our belongings to take to Italy and selling some items we no longer need. I hate eBay because of the useless questions on items that up for bargain prices. People seem to want the crown jewels for the price of a sausage roll. Also we’re having real problems with people saying they’ll buy items that are too big to post with payment on collection, but we never hear from them again. Just a nightmare. I will never use eBay again.

I am still working as long as possible, so we can keep earning money as John has now stopped working. He is doing most of the packing and dealing with the estate agent and solicitors with me helping as and when needed for that extra push, and I’m helping with packing at night and weekends.

As we are not busy with anything important (sarcastic I know) at the beginning of November, John and I decided to get married. What I didn’t know was that you have to wait a full 28 days from notice of intent to actually getting married which was annoying. It will not be a big wedding by any stretch of the imagination, just a statutory service at the local registry office with two witnesses. We could have just dragged people from the street but our first choices were David, my brother and Anna, John’s daughter and luckily they are happy to do it, especially as it is also both of their birthdays on the same day.

We did go shopping for wedding rings in Birmingham’s Jewellery Quarter. Where else would we go as we’re so close? But there are so many shops, we had no idea where to start. Then suddenly we saw a shop called J & M Jewellers, yes, like John and Michelle! So we took it as a sign an we had to go there. Luckily they are really nice and their stuff is also great so we chose our wedding bands from our namesakes.

We get married on the 4th December which means we will be more than likely homeless when we do get married if completion goes through on the 30th, and if it does go through, we plan to fly out to Scalea on the 5th December to venture on our long honeymoon. So to make life easier, we decided to stay in our local pub/hotel/restaurant until 5th when we hope we’ll fly to Italy. Also we can celebrate in the pub afterwards and also say goodbye to any of our friends that have the time to come over.

It is all about hope at the moment. The only thing that is definite is us getting married.

If you are wondering why we are not waiting to move until after the wedding date, there is a good reason. It is the fact that Tony spends Christmas with his family in the UK and he leaves Italy for the UK on the 10th December and does not return until the New Year. He did say he can return to Italy if needs be, but hopefully (that word again) he will not need to.

We also have to allow time to be able to get heat into the property, it does not have any as it is only used as a holiday home. Even though it is warmer than the UK, it will still be very cold at night inside the building. We very much remember when we first stayed in Scalea back in February in an apartment. It was so cold. The owner supplied us with a portable gas heater, but the building itself would not get warm, so neither could we. Also we have to make sure that all funds clear from our purchaser paying us and us paying our sellers as well as the process of conversion, the weekend and the Italian banking process. It all seems very complicated but the process itself is quite simple, we just need time.

So that’s the update so far, hopefully this time next month we will be settled to enjoy Christmas in our new home.