After seeing mention of the issues with the house I purchased in order to be closer to London, one of my subscribers asked me what had actually happened and, if my situation had been better and not so critically resource-starved, what would I have done?
What happened…
The house-buying process didn’t go smoothly to begin with. Those of you who follow my twitter account (same name: @LawHealthTech) will have seen me post during last year about how first the banks were making my life far more difficult than it needed to be.
Over the course of a couple of months, HSBC and Amex both kept suspending my credit cards - often for simple, low value purchases that I made regularly from the same vendors. For HSBC it was my London-based coffee bean supplier. Every month I would dare to order between £27 and £40 of fresh-roasted coffee beans to the same address as was registered on my credit card and bank account. And every month HSBC would either immediately suspend my card, then necessitating making the purchase using my debit card, or they would suspend the card almost immediately after the purchase had completed. Each time I would have to ring up and go through a process to identify me and then identify the most recent transactions, only to then have to identify the coffee purchase and acknowledge that yes, just like the last several months, that was me too. After several months of this I dared to ask why this kept happening. After going through the process of reactivating the card (which on this occassion didn’t work, and for more than 8 or 9 months after the card was unusable), the Indian-sounding man on the phone put me on hold for about 15-20 seconds, and then returned to speaking with me. He first curtly told me that it may have been for environmental reasons - that purchasing coffee may be exceeding my carbon footprint (what a complete load of bollocks). Then he became more overtly rude in his tone and choice of words and telling me that white people like me weren’t the type of customers the bank wanted. When I complained to the bank my complaint and their responses were a lesson in how HSBC’s complaints staff were trained to deliberately obfuscate and go around the houses.
Eventually, after three complaints and escalation to what it seemed was, at best, the complaints team FOR the complaints team, they admitted that they could see the length of my call with the Indian-sounding man was around 7 minutes longer than the recording - meaning that he had disabled the usual call monitoring at the point where he put me on hold and the latter enviro-racist attack on me went unrecorded. They first offered me a £50 credit (which they did actually apply to my card). When I responded in writing that it wasn’t about seeking a pitifully useless credit to my already entirely paid off credit card, it was about the fact that (a) the card hadn’t worked properly for most of the year and I was unwilling to take verbal assurances that it would now magically be ‘okay’, and (b) the rude racist attack I had endured from their credit card support staff member, they first offered another £100 goodwill credit, and then another £150, if I would formally agree to drop the complaint and take it no further. I refused to allow them to NDA this under the carpet, and as such did not receive either of these pitiful additional amounts. Their conduct was disgraceful and more about shutting me up and sending me away so they could cover up their own shortcomings than actually investigating the issue and doing the right thing. Should I have expected anything less? Needless to say, I refused HSBC’s offer of a mortgage when buying the house, as well. It was a similar issue with Amex and, even though my Amex sat fully paid off with a zero balance for more than a year, Amex even kept refusing my demands to close the account. It was only recently, and after Amex demonstrated just how criminal and racketeering an organisation they really can be, that I eventually got them in a position where they finally agreed to close the account but, as you will see in my Twitter feed, it was only after they sought to charge me for a subscription to Toby Young’s vacuous and useless Free Speech Union (a topic for a future post) that I had cancelled a year before and for their annual card fee that they finally closed the card off and let me be. Whether they paid the FSU and bore the cost themselves or not, I have no idea. All I know is that, thank heavens, I didn’t. And I would wholeheartedly endorse any recommendation made that you don’t subscribe to the FSU, either1.
Then there were the real estates. Real estates and their agents have completely lost the plot with customer service. More about collecting your personal data and trying to sell you their brokered mortgages, insurance and other products that you can get cheaper and better simply by doing it yourself, the main issue I had was with certain small (<12 office) real estate chains in the West Midlands area whose agents and owner were incredibly unethical. For example, I viewed and negotiated a price on a property with a vendor, via an agent from this agency, when all of a sudden the process seemed to stall. The agent kept claiming the vendor (the person who owned and was selling the house) wanted all manner of personal information from us, while when I looked at the Land Register and identified the vendor and contacted him, he said the agent had said we were the cause of the delay because we (a) hadn’t given the agent our solicitors details and (b) wanted to negotiate another significant reduction in price. The agency had the vendor in a bind, because they had signed a 6 month exclusive contract. It appeared to them that this contract meant they couldn’t take the house off the market and sell direct or through anyone else without paying the agency. They were also needing to sell quickly as their interest rate had significantly increased and they could no longer afford the mortgage. Then, the house suddenly sold. The purchaser? one of the agents from the agency bought it for a price lower than I had offered. Around four months later I noticed that the house was relisted by that agency at a price even higher than the vendor had originally listed it for with them. The agent had known of their pressing need, and used it against both them and me. Several months later I had a second run-in with a different agent from another office of this same agency chain, which is when I found out that they were a small privately owned chain run by the same chap, and that they had a reputation for this type of frustrating and unethical behaviour.
In the end, after going through the process and viewing more than 50 houses, making offers on around a dozen, and then watching as they kept falling through, the house I bought was a compromise… or more accurately, a collection of compromises. However, for all its faults it was, at least when I viewed it, complete and in reasonably good maintenance. I made an offer and the offer was accepted, but months and months went by with nothing happening. It seemed that the vendor was having some difficulty in getting their tenants out in order to give me vacant possession of the property. This persisted until Christmas, when I finally advised that in the new year I would be withdrawing my offer and resuming my search. this resulted in some sudden action from the vendor, and within a week and after some of the usual argy-bargy between lawyers, we suddenly had a handover date. As best as I can ascertain, I believe the vendor finally put the hard word on the tenants who, according to the neighbours, had not really been doing anything for most of the second half of 2023 to find somewhere else to live and vacate the property.
On the day I arrived to receive the keys from the agent there was a 2 tonne skip in the front yard full to the brim with an eye-watering array of life’s detritus. The agent unlocked the front door, handed me the key and was gone before you could say “welcome to your new home.” When I walked inside, I found out why.
The tenants on the way our had removed chattels from the property that were listed on the report. Nothing terribly important, but noticeable nontheless. During their tenancy they had hand-painted more than one room of the house - I knew this going in. They had lso installed bolt locks on almost every internal door, such as on the outside of their children’s bedroom - the implication being that they obviously locked their children inside their bedrooms. They had, during their tenancy, drilled holes in many walls and mounted TVs and other devices. I had not seen many of these holes because in both the agent photos and when I toured the house, they had hung pictures in or over almost every one of these sets of holes or tv brackets. They had removed some brackets off the wall, leaving large holes in the walls, and made what I can only believe were deliberate holes in others. I have gone through several 2.5 and 5kg tubs of premix plaster repairing these holes, big and small, and restoring the house to the way it should be. they smashed powerpoints, the porcelein cistern and cistern lids of toilets, took the cast iron top from one side of the gas range, two upstairs windows need their frames replaced because they used to smoke at the window and annoy the neighbours by flicking butts into their yard, and other things. I took several weeks of my vacation from the university and tried to make good.
In two days this ‘feature wall’ whose features mainly consisted of ten 1/4-1/2 inch round holes where a tv bracket had been installed in not one but three different places, and a huge hole where they had fed in Sky TV cabling through the brick and plaster walls direct to the TV when it had been on the left side of the wall…
Became this…
And more recently, thanks to the generosity of one subscriber, that faux chandelier and the drop wiring to it has been replaced because simply trying to replace one blown bulb (the left-most burnt-out one in this image) would cause arcing in this light fixture and the one in the next room, and trip the main house fuse.
In three days this room, hand-painted with cheap oil paints, and again full of holes where they had put up a TV for their young son - and a light fixture that hung broken from the ceiling…
Became this - as designed and at the request by my 11yo son.
In total, 8 power points, 4 light fixtures (with two still needing replacement), holes in the plaster walls ranging from 1/4 inch to over 1 foot in diameter, and a range of other both cheap and expensive repairs has already occured. The main bathroom at present is barely functional and the new bath, shower, and other fixtures and fittings are all on pallets in the garage awaiting my time (and the money for tiles) to do the complete removal and renovation. Some of the plumbing in the ground floor is non-functional, and there are issues with the way the electrics of the house were changed when the extension was built onto it about ten years ago.
This was the room with the 1 foot diameter hole (to the upper right of the image) where something had either been violently removed from, or banged into, the wall…
I also had to have the power points rewired - the set in the middle didn’t work and the set on the right tripped the downstairs RCD fuse as they had been a ‘home bodge’ installation. After four days and more than 50 hours work, that room now looks like this…
I could go on and show you all the rooms, suffice to say that every room had issues like this and, having run out of time and funds, I still have several to go.
What would I have done?
If resources had been available, I had set my heart on potentially my stupidest idea.
I would have purchased this property:
…and set up an ad-revenue sponsored YouTube channel as is common these days for home renovators and crash-damaged car rebuilders, and put out twice-weekly videos of the efforts and struggles of YouTube’s potentially stupidest house finisher (i.e. me) completing this potentially amazing house that, due to covid, had become an excellent but abandoned project.
Who knows… miracles might happen.
How ironic would it be if the FSU attacked my right to free speech to say this to you?
OMG! Moving house is just so stressful! Along the way there just seems to be so much avoidable nonsence. Poor you! It looks like you're doing a brilliant job sorting it all out.
My current home was purchased several years ago, a nice house, in a favoured location, with green space all around. I wanted to move in within a month which was agreed via the Estate Agent as my buyer needed to move quickly. When it came to exchanging contracts, I couldn't move in for 3 months because the seller was too busy with her 'catering business'. The choices were to pull out, having paid for survey, solicitor fees etc, wait and loose the buyer for my property or complete on my sale, put everything into storage and live out of bags with a small child, staying with family and friends and wait for the purchase to go through. I did the latter, feeling my possessions would be safely stored in 'dry, secure storage' at hundreds of pounds a month. It wasn't dry and it wasn't secure..... But that's another story.
The day of completion finally arrived! The keys were mine the door was opened and yuk! After days of rain, it looked like muddy elephants had been partying in the lounge. The pale blue carpet was no longer that colour at all! The downstairs loo was cracked and leaking, the kitchen counter was burnt as were the units next to the cooker, and the ceiling looked like something orange had exoded. I'm assuming it was the aftermath of what must have been one hell of a party! The slow walk round in daylight revealed the brightly coloured walls, I thought a quick blitz with emulsion would sort out, were GLOSS Paint, everywhere, red, orange, purple, yellow, blue and grey! Even the tiles in the bathroom and the backs of the doors! Then the very loud, hostile man from next door appeared at the front door which I opened to politely say hello.....but was greeted with 'I hope you're not going to be having f**ng parties and a house full of blokes all the time keeping me awake'.......... The central heating boiler was broken, the garden fence was waving in the wind, the kitchen smelt like a chip shop. Then the removal men arrived in the rain like tornadoes, everything I owned, minus the bits that went missing, were in the house at break neck speed, wet and mouldy!
Well some people like a challenge and others can transform a bomb site, I fully knew you were in the second category. its looking great. I want to take this opportunity while talking of customer service Curry's was the experience that stripped my brain, and insisted factory level compliance of all my molecules .When I asked for the chat transcripts -because finally and against ever iota of common sense in my body I got into a 'do you understand me?- with one guy. His response was he had auto script on and he must be right. It was about past present and future tenses , since I had no idea whether in the present the past or the future the hoped for thing ( my washing machine refund ) would happen. I vowed never to use them again, but as my washing machine was a voucher from Curry's I then had to get a better model from them. I have decided if it goes wrong I will go to the manufacturer's. I will skip 99 percent detail as too traumatic to recall, but the machine world is well into our domestic sphere now.
Good luck with everything, colour scheme is cool, and after all if you can tackle that , you can do anything. Most of us would have just crawled into a hole and died.
reading a good book on the Lucy Letby Case by Paul Bamford, lots of interesting stuff sure you have it on you radar anyway.