Owning your own home

drive, fly, drive

you monster

Yes.

Letter from our solicitor today - apparently our sale is still on.

perfect time to lower your offer for the next place!

There is no next place which is a bit of an issue!

uh oh .. have you heard of Catford?

Thought you were going to Stratford?

Too far from Epping init

They couldn’t tell us if a VW van would go in the garage or not so we sacked that off - turns out that was probably a bit of luck because I’m not sure how we’d find the money to fund it now in time.

You might be able to get 20% off?

I want to move to Chingford. Missus less keen. Have you looked round there?

Yeah it looks awful

Sorry Chingford

Wanstead looks better. Not sure about transport though.

You might be able to get 20% off?

Well it was off plan so you can’t negotiate anyway. But I might revisit when they are built, drive the van over, see if it fits then make an offer now they might be really desperate to shift them.

It’s an odd development with lots of problems if you look carefully though. The will the van fit thing was the straw that busted its back etc.

Hmmm - I wouldn't buy a new development / off plan house. As far as I can see, all modern developments of at least the last 10 years are garbage.

Err, I'm pretty sure there are some good quality developer builds in the last 10-15 years, maybe more so than the 20 years prior to that. 80s and 90s was pretty shit for new-build quality.

Definitely a sweeping generalisation on my part! I have looked round a fair few though, used to rent in one from around 2008 (Highbury stadium square) and now live in one from 2001. The former was meant to be more up market, but the latter is actually way better finished.

There will be hundreds if not thousands of villages in that category. The map posted is a bit conservative I think - I live in a village between High Wycombe & Stokenchurch, it's 30mins to LHR at 06.00 and between 45 mins to an hour to return at evening rush hour.

Wanstead is very nice. Good links into central too.

As far as I can see, all modern developments of at least the last 10 years are garbage.

Yeah that's always a risk. They'd already put up two identical sets of houses there so we made some friends there and looked at their places. They were actually quite happy with them. The residents association was actively getting TW to fix stuff, so on that front it seemed OK.

The things that put me off were the fees the LDA wants to charge you for living there, the management of the area by a shit housing association who also want to charge you, and that the third stage in particular contained a disproportionate bulk of the social housing. Yeah, on that last point, I'm clearly evil, but I'm kinda done with mixed stuff, it's just bad and depressing watching the inevitable few bad eggs making life utterly miserable for everyone else who lives there.

I’ll chime in here, what irritates me most about new builds and to a certain extent most redevelopments is the desire to takeaway a room (kitchen) and merge it into the front room.
Boils my piss, especially when there isn’t another room for you to chill in.
No issue with knocking kitchen into dining room, and you still have a seperate front room. Knocking kitchen into front room Can do one.

If you have a front room it just ends up as pram storage though!

Or a kids play space!

Yeah but then you can't watch them when you are preparing the 10 billionth meal of the day or doing the inevitable pile of washing up.

I've thought this through ;)

Chingford's an odd one.

I taught in a school there for two years and don't really have fond memories of it, and my nan lives there so I've been going there all my life (for what it's worth, she's lived there since 1963 but complains there are "too many southerners.")

It's definitely got potential to be a nice place to live - reasonably well-connected, amazing green space, good chippy on the high street- but for me there's just something a bit unpleasant about it. There's no nice pub but plenty of awful ones.

Who needs to watch them, just wait for the silence or the scream!