Saturday 5 March 2011

Day Five...and also, what the hell dude?

Ok so today's challenge is to write about a time you wanted to end your own life. Sweetheart, if I had to write about that we'd be here all day, so I'm going to redirect you to this other post which deals with a similar theme and in the meantime tell you about a time that I nearly ended the life of someone else. Someone I've never met. Someone I will never meet and will never have to deal with. Thank God.

The hubby and I, as you may have previously gleaned from my blog, are currently in the housing market for somewhere that isn't in Anfield, and is bigger than our flat. Also, not suffering with the damp, and at a reasonable price given circumstances. We're not too picky, we're not expecting Buckingham Palace or anything like that. All we ask is that the cieling isn't caving in, insulation isn't littering the floor, that mould monsters aren't encroaching on lunch.

So I found this house online. It was £325 a month. Immediately I'm thinking, ok, it's not going to be anything special...but hey, I'd be a fool to turn my nose up at it for that price without at least investigating it further, right? The pictures show a small but bright house that we could concievably move into, in an area which we are relatively well aquainted with. It's not too far from the house we used to live in. I call up for a viewing and they are a lovely bunch. 12 o clock on Saturday.

I'm looking at the clock, it's now 1 o clock. We looked around, left, got a bus back and had a good long talk with our current land lord in the time since we first stepped into that house. And it took her a good 5 minutes just to try and open the door.

Ok so once the lady, who was lovely don't get me wrong, and quite as shocked as we were, finally prized open the door, we were greeted with the smell of moulding plaster. That was before we set foot into the house and nearly went through the floor...I swear to God, it wouldn't suprise me if, beneath the laminate flooring, the foundations of that house were built on decomposing bodies. It was certainly both squishy and uneven enough! Tiptoeing past the mountain of letters accumulating dust in the hallway, we came into the open living room/lounge and were greeted with...






Aah, not too bad, not too bad.

If that's what we'd seen. That chimney breast? Wallpapered. And the big deal? Well, in between this photo being taken and 12 o clock midday today, that perfectly nicely painted chimney breast has been papered over, and then the paper has begun to peel away and mould. Quite substantially. One of the women who was viewing the place with us asked if the fire had a safety inspection certificate. She gave it a quick look over...and the front of it fell off. Oh dear...

So we move on to the kitchen...




Ok, even from this picture we weren't expecting much from the kitchen, but hey, there's room there for a washing machine and an oven and what not. Yes?

Well indeed, inbetween the time that this picture was taken and 12 o clock this afternoon, that kitchen is no more. It has been ripped out, and replaced with a brand new kitchen suite. Fantastic :D. Um, no. Not fantastic. It's a half done job. The whole lot is covered in plaster dust, the walls themselves are bare except for the new plaster...the new plaster is moulding! And the best bit? You can see up through the ceiling into the bathroom!

Speaking of the bathroom...





Well, that's not too bad, is it? I mean, it's not brilliant but...

But oh wait, where did those tiles dissapear to? And the side of the bath? And the...you know...the floor? I can see someone downstairs looking at the kitchen...

So anyway. It may not suprise you to find that, after having seen these pictures and thinking "mm, well that looks fairly liveable" and looking forward to possibly be moving into such a place relatively soon being that the website on which it is featured says "Available Now!" written everywhere, we weren't happy. Infact, we were bloody pissed off that we'd even bothered to take the time to come out there. That bus money could have been ice cream, dammit! Ice Cream!

The estate agent was, herself, rather shocked. When we first went in and our fellow viewers asked about it being decorated properly, she said well, if you want that you can request it when you make an offer. We then shimmied off upstairs to take a looksee at the bedrooms/bathroom (by the way, I didn't realise that fiber glass insulation worked just as well spilling out of the cieling and all over the first floor coridoor) and by the time we came back down she'd had a good look around herself (Apparently it was a new property for the agency and this was the first time she'd been in) and her tune had changed to "well, you can put an offer in, but this is going to need a lot of work before we can actually let you in".

Now, granted whoever it is who owns that house is not our landlord and things could be much worse if we were already living there, being neglected by a landlord who just doesn't care, but it just cheeses me off. Does this guy really think people will look at his photo's and not play spot the difference? I'm sure your dinky little house was once lovely...doesn't mean it is now! Come back from Portugal and do your work!

So yes. There was a wasted morning, but hey, we live on. As luck would have it we bumped into our current landlord on the way back, who informed us he would soon have a house on the market that he'd keep us in mind for when it became available, and it's in our budget too so fingers crossed it will come available soon and it turns out to be nice ^_^.

For now we keep on hunting around.

1 comment:

  1. That reminds me of a flat i viewed with my mum, it was £350 per month and opposite a lovely park... it had also been home to a on/off drug addict for 8 years - and the landlord had just stuck in some junky furniture when that tenant left...

    The agent showing us around hadn't seen the property before, her response, "I wouldn't let my daughter live her, lets go" The letting agent had dropped the property off their books by the end of the week.

    Something tells me this may happen here...

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