The lease has been signed and counter-signed, the needed monies have been paid, we’re scheduled to get keys to the new apartment on Tuesday and the the removers have been booked for Wednesday.
So of course the lift in the building has gone out of service again this afternoon.
I shouldn’t be surprised. Everything about this has been more complicated than it needs be.
For example – for some reason, despite being in the UK where party-to-party bank transfers are de rigueur, Foxtons (the agency marketing and managing the apartment) preferred we pay the first months rent and deposit (typically 5 weeks of rent) by credit card.
The demand was slightly more than our available credit on our Amex, so I called Amex, who obligingly raised the limit. Then I used the Amex to pay Foxtons, and bank transferred the funds to Amex once the charge settled. I imagine Amex was happy to get a rather sizeable processing fee (from Foxtons), and I don’t object to the points.
In other news, we seem to have come to an almost reasonable outcome with our landlord. We’re moving out, and she’s waving the rent as of the date we requested to end our tenancy. We’re technically still on the lease over the required 60 day notice period, which I think is because she’s in a dispute with the block agent responsible for the roof, but I honestly don’t understand it. I know I have a release of my responsibility in writing from the landlords agent, so I’m reasonably confident I’m not being setup to be sucker-punched.
Of course the landlord (via her agency) and the building manger responsible for the roof are both pointing at each other as the party that should pay my moving costs. So it looks like if I want to collect that money, it’s going to involve hiring a solicitor and getting in the middle of their conflict. Which sounds like no fun at all.
The rational part of me knows that it’s not enough money to justify hiring legal representation and digging in for a fight that could easily take a year or more. Never mind figuring out how to actually collect if the judgement is in my favor.
The less rational part of me wants to hire the solicitor on a spoils-of-war basis – once I’ve recovered my losses and legal fees, the solicitor can keep whatever excess they recover. I suspect that their legal system won’t permit such shenanigans, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to try.
Either way, that’s clearly a fight best not started until we’ve seen the back of this place.
So Monday morning I go sit the driving theory test, Tuesday we collect keys and attend the inventory (pre-move-in check) of the apartment, Wednesday we move, and Thursday we…
Actually, I dunno what we do on Thursday. Ask me on Wednesday.
At the moment I’d just like to get a good nights sleep – something that hasn’t happened since it started raining in our bedroom two weeks ago.
Oh, and that storm that rained in our bedroom? It was the UK’s wettest day on record. If it hadn’t rained in the bedroom before – and again since – I might be tempted to say it was a fluke.
But fluke or no, over two weeks later, with multiple reports of new evidence of water in each successive rain, neither my landlord, their agent, or the building manager has presented a plan for fixing the roof.
So it’s time to take my leave of this circus and these monkeys, ’cause as mentioned above – I think the monkeys are about to get into a legal tussle, which is basically the more “civilized” version of throwing poo at each other.