On Monday 20th December, with the temperature at minus something stupid, we moved out of our recently sold house. Our purchased house in the country wasn’t quite ready yet, so we dragged our belongings across the city & into a rented house for a few months. It was easily the most stressfull day either of us had encountered… Until today that is!!!
After a painful wait, we finally received news of a completion date for our house in the country. Friday 15th April & we’d finally get the keys to our new house. We promptly booked a big van & set about re-packing our belongings. By Thursday we were almost completely packed, and that’s when we received the first of what would be many, many phone-calls from our solicitors… I’ll try to make what is about to follow as simple as possible, because the whole house moving process can get a wee bit complicated. So, on Thursday afternoon our solicitors called to say that our vendors solicitors, only called our solicitors to confirm the move on Wednesday afternoon, and this didn’t give enough time to get our mortgage money released in time for Friday’s planned move. The move was off š We were stunned, angry & Tracy cried š In desperation we called our mortgage company, who said releasing our money on Friday wasn’t a problem. This info was quickly relayed to our solicitors. The move was ‘probably’ back on. They’d let us know first thing Friday morning. I then called our van-hire company to tell them about the possible problem…
‘Sorry mate, you’ll still have to pay us for the van, even if you cancel it…‘
Friday morning came & we sat by the phone, not knowing whether to continue our packing or whether to collect our van or not. At 10.30 we were told that our mortgage money had been released, so we collected our van & began to pack it. By about 1.30 our van & quite a few cars were completely full & we were ready to head off into the country. Once more we plonked ourselves by the phone & waited for news that our vendors had moved out & our keys were ready to collect. The waiting continued… And continued. At about 4.00 we then had a call from our solicitors telling us that they had sent our mortgage money to our vendor’s solicitors, who had promptly sent it back!!! Apparently it was too short notice to complete the move. Our solicitors told us that they were going to try to get us into our county house on some legal loophole, but would need our vendor’s solicitors to agree to it. More impatient phone waiting ensued… And ensued…
5.00pm we’d heard nothing. I gave our solicitors a call …
‘What the hell is happening? Are we moving or not?‘
‘I’m really sorry, but we’ve still not heard back from the vendor’s solicitors.’
‘But how long have we got? Surely there’s a cut-off point? And what the hell are we supposed to do with the van load of stuff we have?‘
‘We close at 5.30. We’ll continue to ring the vendor’s solicitors…‘
Our vendor’s solicitors had cocked up big time and had probably already gone home. They basically couldn’t give a toss about helping to push the move along!!! At 5.30 our frustrated & angry solicitors gave us the crushing news that our planned house move was off. As our van was booked out to someone else at 9.00am on Sat, we set about unpacking it back into our rented house, which is where I’m currently sitting (amongst the carnage) & blogging š
It transpires that the people our vendors were buying off had got their moving dates mixed up, which had caused the house chain to crumble… Tomorrow I’ll return & pay for a van that we spent all morning packing & all afternoon unpacking (back into the same house it came out of!!!). I’m rather hoping that our vendor’s solicitors will pay for this. It would also be nice if they could reimburse us for days taken off work & not to mention all of the extra man (& lady) power we had helping us today. All of the help & nice comments on Facebook & Twitter were hugely appreciated.
And finally. Lessons learnt…
- Don’t move house.
- If you do, move into an empty house.
- And if it’s not empty, do make sure both sets of solicitors are actually up to the job.
- Oh and… Don’t be so organised as to pre-book your house-move with your broadband provider. We now have no house or Internet š
Update…
This bog post has sat on the Internet since 2011. During that time, it’s generated a fair few comments from people sharing similar unfortunate experiences with our vendor’s solicitors. Well, after five and half years, I’ve received an apology, an explanation and some financial compensation ? A wee bit belated, but nice to hear. So, as a result, the wording of this blog post has been slightly tweaked from its original, angry, fruity version. I’ve also removed comments. It was lovely and enlightening to receive them, but as I’ve just said, for us this sorry chapter is now closed š
