Moving on Up

• Hours spent physically at work – 8
• Time spent searching and saving dream homes/holiday homes – 7
• Number of countries searched in quest for dream home/holiday home – 25
• Time spent Googling ‘Hollyoaks Spoilers’ – 30 mins
• Lunch – 30 mins
• Number of times asked colleagues for work to do – 40
• Number of fucks now given – Zero
• Boredom level – 70 million
• Number of invoices to photocopy before a stapler is shoved up a colleague’s arse – Zero

I feel like Bridget Jones where Hugh Grant utters the immortal line "All you do is waltz in wearing a short skirt and a see through top and fanny about with the press releases"...only without the short skirt or see through top on account of my fatness.

Much excitement was caused by the discovery just after Christmas that a ‘peer’ home had gone on sale in the village.  By ‘peer’ this can be interpreted as same village, same proximity to very busy main road, same age, same construction materials, but smaller.  It also happened to be one of my favourite homes in the village and I was gagging for a nosy at the interiors.  After several casual drive-bys to ascertain which twisted estate agency was selling said house, and not recognising the brand, decided to Google before we got reported as potential burglars on a stake out (believe it or not it happens a lot where we live – either your car is ‘known’ and you get Facebooked with ‘WTF are you driving past our house constantly for?’ or there’s a ‘Pikeys are in the village again, lock up your valuables’ text swiftly doing the rounds on the Neighbourhood WhatsApp group).

As there had been a postal mix up earlier last year (Postie seems to be very dyslexic with his 2s where we live to the point where one of our neighbours and I are now text chatting “Got your post again here”) and therefore in possession of the house number, my Google skills were honed and I effectively located said house on Rightmove (although I do prefer Zoopla cos I like Phil Spencer, and as an aside they do give you an audit trail of when the house was listed, allowing a more shrewd buyer to know how much piss they can extract from the vendor when putting an offer in).  Nearly choked on my tea as I spluttered to my husband “It’s £650k, SIX HUNDRED AND FIFTY FUCKING GRAND”.  This was swiftly followed up with guffaws of “What?  Never?  Surely not?”, “Is that a typo?  How can they get away with that?  But they are right on the main road and I mean RIGHT on it!!”.  Not an exaggeration, as the only thing separating the house of gorgeousness and the highway of death is 3 feet of tarmac.

Therefore what followed was approximately 20 seconds of photo flicking and cooing over gorgeous interiors (“She works from home a lot, just look at the amount of pink in that office, that’s a girl’s room” – all said in the day and age of equality and no sexism obvs), because that’s all the patience we could muster before doing our sums.  HWM got totally over excited and estimated that, given our house only cost a quarter of this, that we could easily spend £100k on the extension we’d always wanted, sell ours for the same and come out with £300k profit (as they say on Homes Under the Hammer, “After taxes and fees of course”).  I think £650k for our shithole is a bit much, even after a £100k makeover.  “They’ll never sell it for that”, I retorted “I’ll keep my eyes peeled and stalk it on the Lang Registry website after it sells to find out what the buyers really paid”.

I’m quite attached to my pad, but surmised that there was obviously a potential to re-mortgage and spend the approximate £300k profit.  Not knowing what I could get for my money-that-I-don’t-have, Rightmove happily informed me that for that amount of money, I could pick up a lovely doer-upper Georgian manse with land in Scotland or a delectable 19^th c. maison de maitre in France, all with change to spare!  

Ooooh which to choose, which to choose….