Amusing Title Required

I've not managed to record any of our doings for the last week or so. This is down to a general sense of can't-be-assedness which took up residence temporarily, making me into a seriously grumpy old git. Fortunately a good argument has restored my demeanour to its default level of grumpiness. I'm not really sure that I can remember accurately what we did over the last week in strict chronological order, so I'm not going to try.

We looked at several houses that were up for sale. One was a holiday home on Oceanview road, except that it was the front plot which meant that one could not actually see the sea. It needed a bit of work but the price was a bit too high. The agent had a couple of other "douppers" but they were really quite hideous and the areas they were in were not really what we wanted. Another supposedly four bedroom house for sale privately was really a three bed house with an extra bed in a corridor. It was also on a busy main road. The final house we looked at again needs some work but has potential which wasn't immediately obvious. More on that story later.

Imogen managed to survive three days at camp unscathed, which for her is something of an achievement. It's not without an unnerving degree of accuracy that Freya used to refer to her as Injure-man, a name that has stuck somewhat. The scooter escapade is now a distant memory and the leg seems to he "hoperating" as normal. Phoebe had yet another visit to the dentist this time to remove two teeth which were basically rotting in her mouth. The tooth fairy was most definitely short changed that night. The dental appointment was right after school, so Di had taken the car and was supposed to be back by 3:30 so I could pick up Imogen. This coincided with Wayne wanting me to collect a trailer from the school where he teaches. I had promised to drive to Rotorua on Saturday to pick up a table that Vicky had bought on TradeMe, the Kiwi equivalent of Ebay. Somehow we managed to coordinate all this activity without leaving anybody at the side of the road.

The journey to Rotorua was straight forward, if slow due to the windy road and trailer combination, with a couple of single track narrow bridges chucked in for good measure. We managed to find the place and load the table up even though it was bigger than the trailer at 1.5 metres square. We even managed to get all eight of the chairs in, one in the boot, 3 inverted in the back of the car and the others in the trailer. It's my guess that that table will be with them until their kids leave home.

I dropped the trailer back to the school first thing on Monday. It's rather handy to know that the school has a trailer available to staff. I'm sure we may be able to abuse this knowledge occasionally.

Now I return to the opening story - the house with potential. Although not in the mount and being only three bedroomed, there is potential to partition off and make a fourth bedroom. The house belongs to an old woman who has bought a retirement flat and needs to complete the sale ASAP. The house is going to auction this Sunday but we were told that if we made an appropriate offer in advance that the house could be ours. The potential wasn't immediately apparent but later inspection of the floor plans were something of a revelation. The main bathroom has been converted into a superb ensuite for the master bedroom, but this leaves the rest of the house with only a shower. It needs a second bathroom, and the floor plan reveals that there is enough space to do this. The lack of a bathroom and the general old lady feel (complete with cat pee smell in the garage) is probably why it's not been snapped up.

This morning we attended the auction of our current residence. I had bought $40,000 at a pitiful exchange rate but alas the usual banking latency meant that the dosh did not show up in our account until 9:30 this morning. Talk about cutting it fine. Strangely, it was $8 short which makes me wonder if the bank has had its filthy paws in there. We took our neighbour along to the auction. She wanted to see who was buying the place and to offer some moral support. It turns out that we were pretty much the only people there other than the estate agent staff.

The auction kicked off and there were no bids. Eventually the price dropped to $180,000 and this motivated me to put in a bid. There seemed to be a couple of other bids maybe from the telephone and possibly from one of the staff, we're not sure. Not surprisingly the reserve price, whatever that was, wasn't met and at $220,000 we were the highest bidder. A period of negotiation took place, and we eventually offered $315,000 which wasn't accepted. The next step apparently was to invite sealed bids for submission to the bank. However at this point, we'd kind of decided that we didn't want it, even though we had the nod that $350,000 would most probably have done the deed. Our neighbour was devastated. She's had five sets of neighbours in the last four years, and we are apparently the most amenable she's had. We think she was desperate to have us stay on, but it wasn't going to happen long term.

To get to our place you have to go down the driveway, which passes two other houses. Although our neighbours are fine, this may not always be so and the potential for aggravation with bad parking would be immense. Also, there's no garden, no view and the house has no character and is a bit of a dormitory. We also noted from the sale particulars that the drain in the middle of the shared concreted area is in fact a soak away. As the rain runs down towards us it stands to reason that a prolonged potential downpour might overflow the soak away, flooding us out. We came to the conclusion that owning this house would be something of a mill stone round our necks as it would be difficult to shift later on. One other thing we noticed is that the rates hadn't been paid for over three years!

With this in mind, we made an offer on the other house, $400,000. The woman apparently considered it, but then spoke to her solicitor, who against the advice of the agent, advised her to proceed to auction. As we are the only interested party, this seems rather silly but I guess we'll find out on Sunday. We also had a call from the agent for our current house, wanting to show someone round tomorrow. They were very polite about it, and thus we agreed to this.