So close and yet so far

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.

 

How I imagine the mortgage company’s lawyers to be

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.

When Madonna appeared on Jonathan Ross¹ in one of the best interviews I’ve seen him do, she was trying to prove her credentials as a born again Brit by claming that she liked nothing more than to while away a few pleasant hours in a lovely old English pub². Thinking he was calling her bluff. He asked her what her favourite bitter³ was. “I’m quite partial to a pint of Timothy Taylor” came the reply. Wossy⁴ thought she had just made something up to save face, but the next day a newspaper found out that Timothy Taylor did indeed exist and was made by a small brewery in West Yorkshire. Subsequently a few pubs here in the South East have started to stock it and I’ve found that I have something in common with Mrs Richie, I like the stuff too.

This evening Ray and I must have been having some kind of argument (we can’t remember, the Timmy Taylor has kicked in in between) because she ran off round to the North Pole, one of our locals. The argument (and remember we’re not really sure if there was one) can’t have been that serious because she called 5 minutes later to tell me that the North Pole now sells TT.

Ray is gregarious almost to a fault. When I arrived at the pub she was already entertaining one of the locals, Dave, who in turn was entertaining her with a virtuosic display of cockney rhyming slang⁵. Now strictly speaking, because I was born within the sound of the Bow Bells, I’m a cockney, but my parents hammered out any trace of a local dialect when I was young by sending me to elocution lessons. That’s right, I’m a Londoner born and bred, but I cannot do a London accent! Nonetheless I managed to teach him “It’s all gone Pete Tong”⁶.

Dave, it turns out, is a builder/decorator who works with other builders/decorators on rather high end projects some as the National Galery and Very Rich People’s Homes. He explained to us (in ever shortening loops, the more he had to drink) that he’s “not cheap, but we’ll give you the date that we’ll turn up and we’ll be there on that day. We’ll give you a schedule and we’ll stick to it and we’ll give you a quote and that’s the price you’ll pay”. For some reason we believe him, so we explain what it is that we’re trying to do and arrange to have him round to take a look. He did, after all, paint a large mural at the end of a cul-de-sac just near the North Pole.

Notes for non UK readers

¹ Jonathon Ross is a popular TV presenter with his own chat show, known for being hilarious and making his interviewees look good at the same time.
² I can confirm that this is (sort of) true. When she and Guy were living in Holland Park, she apparently used to frequent a pub called the Windsor Castle, notable for two VERY low doorways (one is about 4 feet high). A friend of mine was in there once and noticed her in the corner. When she got up to leave about half the pub got up with her, because they were all her security guards.
³ Bitter is what the rest of the world thinks of as “warm, flat beer”. An acquired taste usually guaranteed to turn the stomachs of non Brits, along with Marmite. Strangely Ray has acquired it since she’s been here.
⁴ Mr Ross makes a feature of the fact that he can’t pronounce his “R”s. A musician friend of mine is terrified of being interviewed by him because he goes out under the name “Ranking Roger”.
⁵ Cockney slang involves finding a (usually 2 or 3 word) phrase whose last word rhymes with the word you actually want to say, then sometimes only saying the first word of the phrase. So “look” becomes “butcher’s hook”, which is usually reduced to “butcher’s”, as in “Let’s ‘ave a butcher’s”.
⁶ Pete Tong is a DJ specialising in dance music and his name, when used in the phrase “It’s all gone Pete Tong”, means “wrong”. It’s very modern slang, probably only about 10 years old, so it might not count.
⁷ (Yes I know there isn’t really a ⁷, this is completely gratuitous). Isn’t it amazing how quickly the singer James Blunt’s name became rhyming slang?

Then Martin (nice chap) at Tiger Tours called to say that there’s a problem with the van that I’m hiring (a transit type thing), so would I mind taking a Splitter van instead? Tiger Tours specialise in hiring to bands (we’ve used them ourselves). This thing is a 9 seater behemoth with another few feet of storage at the back. The whole thing is 6.5m or 21′4″ long. I guess the fridge/freezer will go in the storage bit (which serves it right) and the kitchen units can be split between the storage and the seats. It’ll probably have DVD players and broadband and all sorts of stuff that’s complete overkill for the task, but Martin said they’ll give it to me for the price of the van I was going to get.

Remember Dave, the builder/decorator we met in the North Pole last week? He arranged to come round at mid day today. Dave couldn’t make it so he sent his partner instead. Unfortunately his partner’s name was a bit unusual so I didn’t quite catch it.

For the first time the process of describing what needs doing to didn’t seem like a chore. We’ve asked him to quote for the floor, the kitchen, lighting in the living room and the shower/steam room (probably the subject for another blog I should think).

He was the first person who seemed to just “get it”. He was totally unphased at the prospect of having to fit an English Rose kitchen and suggested that before we go ahead and restore the units we let them place them roughly so we can all see what we’re dealing with.

In brief, he filled us with as much confidence as Dave did when we first met him. Let’s see what his quote is like when he gets it to us in a few days’ time.

So here’s one of the reasons why we decided to fit our own kitchen.

This is the first time we’ve ever tried to get a kitchen fitted and yet, when it comes to dealing with sales people we feel like we’re old hands. You see, kitchen sales people all share the same script. To us it seems that it all started with Everest, the double glazing outfit, but that’s just because they’re the best exponents of the genre. In fact the first time I ever came across the technique was from Anglian, another company that sells double glazing.

The script is as follows:

1. You’re told what a lovely home you have (this is to warm you up for a later point)
2. They take your basic requirements.
3. They try to persuade you that your basic requirements are wrong and that these are the requirements you should have.
4. After much sleight of hand and apparent workings out on a piece of paper you’re handed a quote for (say) £29,000. Cue shocked expression on your face.

5. They then tell you that, for no specific reason, they can give you a discount of up to 40%, bringing the price down to £17,400.
6. They look into your eyes to see whether there’s any flicker of relief at this “discounted” price. If you weaken for a milisecond they pounce and try to seal the deal.
7. You don’t, so they reprise the “you have a lovely home” theory from point 1. This mutates into “Your home is an ideal show home” whereby they can  give you an additional 30% off if you agree to a sign in your front garden. Show the salesperson the door immediately if they tell you that you qualify because you’re on a corner or are close to a school, church or gym. The woman from Anglian nearly wet herself with excitement when I told her that I lived as close as a mile from the nearest church and a mere mile and half from the closest gym.
8. You still don’t bite, so they place a call to a mystery manager. The idea is that you’re supposed to witness them “negotiating” on your behalf, pleading that your case is special in some way. We like leaving them to it, watching them having an imaginary conversation from the other end of the flat.
9. The call ends with “He wants to speak to you”. The “manager” explains to you that the only reason they can offer such a good price is because they have a special promotion on that ends “today”. What an amazing coincidence!
10. The sales person presents you with a form to sign in two places as if you’ve already agreed. When you refuse, they explain that the first signature is just to say that you agree that they paid you a visit and that you “have” to sign. You don’t, but I did have one saleswoman implying a threat of legal action when I refused.

We always tell them them not to waste our time with these tactics, they always say that they don’t and then they always do.

Oddly enough we did get our secondary glazing from Everest, but we had an absolute rarity. A double glazing salesman with integrity who just told us the best price he could give us without any of the BS. Ray told Everest that we’d had bad experiences in the past an they sent along this guy. I knew we’d get along when he told as he used to be an A&R man who hated the record industry as much as he now hated the double glazing industry. He’s left Everest now, but I will gladly supply his contact details and a glowing reference to anybody who’s sick of robots.