HH1 - 12.12.12 - House-hunting stories

We’ve been house-hunting, but I haven’t wanted to post about it…

For several reasons: firstly, I’m superstitious, and don’t want to jinx the process, and secondly, we’re finding it quite tiring and time-consuming.  I haven’t had the energy to rattle on about places we’ve seen, nor the time to post when we’ve managed to view properties on both days of the weekend!

We’re not helping ourselves much, either; we don’t really know what we want [apart from rural, with a huge garden!] or where.  We do know what we don’t want, so that’s a start, I suppose!

Poor thigh - bruises from dogs jumping up

Gripes from house-hunting:

• Owners: if your dog isn’t trained to not jump up at people, please shut it away.  This goes double when you have two dogs, and treble when you have three!  I have nearly recovered from the bruises inflicted by viewings over three weeks ago.  All the adult males let their dogs repeatedly jump up at me [bonus points to the bloke who asked us to remove our shoes after we had been looking around his dog-shit infested garden; I hate having my clean socks padding round the same floor as dogs’ muddy paws!], so I had five dogs of various sizes leaving muddy prints on my clothes.  Each householder proudly showed us the external dog-run.  Don’t just boast about it, people, use it!!.  Kudos to “Evie” and her parents – the only place where we were shown round by a minor was the only place where the external dog-pen was used to, ya know, pen dogs up in!
• A spin-off from above: if your floor is dirty (and particularly if you have indoor-outdoor dogs), please don’t ask your viewers to remove their shoes.  I have learnt [the hard way], not to wear nice clothes, or light-coloured socks/tights, but people you are trying to sell the most expensive thing I/we will ever buy – you could clean it before asking the earth for it!!
• Another spin-off from above: if your house is a fixer-upper, either fix it up (and then you can expect top dollar) or price it accordingly – when your house has sat on the market for nearly/over two years all it says to viewers is that your expectations are unrealistic/out of synch with the current housing market.  What it may also say is that you are deluded, or greedy, or even all of the above.  What it does not do is make your house seem like any kind of a bargain…  And as prices are stagnant/have dropped, if you actually want to sell your house, you are ‘shooting yourself in the foot’!
• Seriously, people: watch Phil Spencer or (if you must) Sarah Beeny, or even better find Ann Maurice on repeat somewhere.  Clean, tidy, correctly-priced houses sell [really quickly, too – we’ve missed viewing a couple because they came onto the market whilst we were on holiday, and they’d sold before we got back]; filthy pits that you wouldn’t house students in (although I think the standards are a lot higher these days than they were back in our day!) priced at the top end of the market really stick on RightMove or Zoopla!
• Estate Agents: what happened to you showing viewers around?  I don’t remember you dropping your charges, but now we get to spend hours with vendors…  [Some are delightful, and we learn lots about their (mostly lovely) houses, but some are frightful bores that we are itching to escape!]  You particularly win no points for scheduling two viewings thirty minutes apart when you do this; mostly (we’ve learned) it takes an hour to view a house with the owner – how can we get to somewhere ten minutes away half an hour after setting foot in property one?  Which brings me on to…
• Estate Agents: if you can’t be bothered putting up a “For Sale” board outside the property you are ‘trying’ to shift, and don’t provide a photograph of what the house looks like from the road, and haven’t suggested to the owner that they erect a visible, clear house name, you can forget me apologising for being late!  I may sound particularly gripey if you were supposed to meet at us at the other house and we follow you to this one, but we were left to the mercies of the owner [actually that lady was really nice, and it was a house we were interested in, but it’s still a rush to try to view a place with an owner in less than 20 minutes; agents can’t normally achieve that speed, and they’re not proud of all the improvements made to the property].
• Gold star to you if the only exterior photo is taken from the rear garden, and the house has two different “finishes”!  [Think half-timbered and black weather-board, or white stucco and brick.
• If you borrowed your camera from Ward & Co (you know who you are!), or even if you are Ward & Co: those wide-angle shots that make a room less than 10’ at its largest dimension appear huge don’t win you any friends.  We’ve been much more impressed with the houses that show better in the “flesh” than on the particulars than those places where we’re trying to work out why all the rooms are so small.
• Estate Agents: what is it with the price “range”?  If the vendor won’t accept less that £x, why advertise it as £x-30,000 to £x+20,000?  That’s really not doing anyone any favours!

OK, rant over!