Financing was a Kafka-esque nightmare
Getting the home improvement loan
Stepping back a bit, I realise I’ve never told the sorry tale of how we’re managing to fund the project.
I bought the property 10 years ago during a slight dip in the market and just before the sustained house price boom of the late 90’s to the mid naughties, so we decided to re-mortgage to raise the money to renovate the flat.
Re-mortgaging
The was just before the credit crunch grew its head of steam so things were a little easier and as it turned out, by switching to a new mortgage company and to a lower interest rate, we effectively raised the entire home improvement loan while slightly reducing our repayments. It’s a tracker mortgage, just below the Bank of England base rate.
Bloody conveyancing lawyers!
The re-mortgage agreed, the fun began. You see lawyers for mortgage companies, estate agents, buyers and sellers of property have contrived to milk the arcane system of property ownership in this country for all it’s worth. To explain briefly, my property is a house comprising two apartments (OK, flats to us Brits). I live on the ground floor and, as is common in these situations, I share the freehold of the property with the owner of the upstairs flat, while each of us has a 99 year lease on our own floor.
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December 10th, 2008 at 8:21 pm
[...] One of the last phone conversations in which my lawyer engaged me – with the clock ticking, naturally – was to ask whether I knew there was a railway line running some 300 yards from my house. I responded by informing him that there was a dotted white line down the middle of the road, and that I was charging him £80 an hour to research the fact. Oddly he didn’t get my point and further padded my bill by exchanging a series of letters (price £50 each) with the vendor’s solicitor regarding the positioning and usage of our rubbish bins (that’ll be garbage cans on t’ other side ot’ pond). You can read more solicitorial lunacy here. [...]