IT’S summertime. That can only mean one thing for the Archers – time to up sticks again.
“Some people go on holiday every year, we move house,” my husband laughed hollowly when his friend asked about our summer plans.
I don’t even know why I’m writing about it; the horror is still so fresh I can barely bring myself to speak about it.
Of course, the day the contracts were finally exchanged, the headlines announced `The biggest house price crash since the 1990s’ was coming.
I didn’t even care. I had to build dozens of boxes and pack an entire house into them. Who has time to think about financial ruin when you’ve run out of bubble wrap?
“Why are you moving again?” the same friend asked with baffled but polite curiosity on moving day.
I was experiencing peak moving stress having just discovered that the white goods we thought we had agreed to buy were on their way to Derry. Meanwhile, despite weeks of packing, our living room looked `lived in’ rather than sparse. Other than the fact the dining table no longer had any legs, there was no reason to think we would be anywhere else that evening.
My frazzled brain couldn’t decide which well-rehearsed reasons for moving I should proffer.
“We had reached the end of our lease.”
“We want to move closer to civilisation.” (Six miles can make all the difference, believe me)
“We’d like to be closer to family.”
“It’s time to move to our forever home, where we can put roots down and watch our children grow up.”
All true, but in that moment all I could think was: “I don’t know. WHY would ANYONE move? EVER?”
I’m sure our lovely, patient friend was asking himself the same question when he and his wife was stranded outside our house with a van full of (a fraction of) our stuff while I was at Curry’s with one set of keys and my husband was at the old house helping the professional movers with the only other set.
I actually apologised to the movers as they brought box after box of unnecessary tat into my shiny new home. (And by the way, the next time my husband leaves the country I’m getting Storage Hunters in to raid the roofspace – keep it to yourselves).
I know moving is supposed to be one of the most stressful experiences in life, but we certainly don’t make it easier for ourselves.
Last time we transplanted ourselves a few weeks before I was due to give birth. This time it was just before a first birthday and the end of my maternity leave.
Estate agents, lawyers and journalists regularly top polls for the most hated professions. There were certainly times during this tortuous process when we all hated each other.
Deadlines were set and missed. One set of solicitors actually closed down mid-process. It took so long we could barely remember what the house looked like and why we wanted to drive ourselves into further debt to buy it.
The chaos was compounded after we made the fatal mistake of relaxing after a recent new homeowner advised us to get a removal firm to pack for us as “it’s not that much more and worth avoiding the extra stress”.
However, despite the fact that we contacted firms as soon as we got a sniff of the date, none could even provide a van, never mind packers.
It was “the worst time of year”, apparently. When we finally got someone to provide a van we had 48 hours to confirm the booking and that proved impossible.
Everyone I moaned to (and you know I did), even our solicitor, kept saying the same thing. How is the system so unnecessarily tortuous? How can it be changed?
There probably is a solution, but I’m too tired at this point to puzzle out what it may be.
A legal firm in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne has gone some way towards alleviating some of the headache.
Toomey Legal is planning to offer packages which can include legal advice, removal services and insurance to cover conveyancing costs, should a sale fall through.
It’s nowhere near a panacea, but imagine if the removal firm was built into the process. Imagine not having to be the (increasingly frayed) conduit between every single disparate – sometimes opposing – part.
Imagine the right hand knowing what the left hand was doing…
b.archer@irishnews.com
@BimpeIN
