Owning your own home

Yeah but I’m annoyed that the EA wasn’t clear that it was best & final stage. I’d have grumpily considered upping my offer beyond my provisional budget and delayed some of the refurb on the place for a year or so

will be real nice when its done!

i have a list of door work to do, mostly sanding back the remnants of 50 years of different locks that have been filled in and painting the door, making a bigger letterbox holeX and finding a cheaper letterbox than the banham one to roughly match the satin brass banham locks

and polishing the brass step nose, hopefully i can make something good out of it

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With the price of the door work we may as well have gone Banham but with the amount of glass around the door I didn't see the point. Went for ERA locks with glass break sensor on the Simplisafe alarm system to save a bit of money.

That porch will scrub up lovely. Blimey this is making me want to move to a house with an overgrown garden and random squirrel paves.

Yeah this, it will look great @stevo_com - worth the effort and monies.

I can't even bring myself to make a poltergeist joke rn tbh.

Don't worry, I need to replace the grille under the step and I'm fairly sure many things have crawled under there and died. When the evening sun hits the front of the house, you can see an eerie light through the floor boards in the hall. I'll be sure to take pictures to give you some ammo.

Good stuff. Also let me know if anything appears in your house you don't recognise - the Battersea Poltergeist case started when the daughter found a silver key on her bed which nobody in the house had seen before. We found a silver key on the floor of our cellar the other day which we both didn't recognise, so I found that a bit worrying!

Anyway, if we have got a ghost it won't be my problem for much longer because we exchanged on our sale on Tuesday and are moving next Wednesday. Still need to exchange on our purchase but we think it should be OK - the other side's hard copies are currently in a FedEx plane over Kazakhstan on their way from Hong Kong but should arrive by Monday.

If they don't or anything else goes wrong we'll just get an Airbnb and send our stuff to storage.

Is there a forum recommended storage company? Preferably one near to E17 because we're using a local removals company.

Shurgard are best. Big yellow are awful

There's a self-storage place in Leaside Road, both very close and not so close (because you can't exactly go as the crow flies) to your new place. I can't recommend it, but a friend had some of his stuff there for a while.

Thanks. There's one in Higham's Park which is pretty near.

They have this £1 for the first month, no minimum stay deal:
https://www.shurgard.co.uk/self-storage-uk/london/chingford-highams-park?utm_source=yext&utm_campaign=UK27&utm_medium=organic

Seems to good to be true but I've read the T&Cs and can't find the catch?

Thanks Oliver. It gets good reviews on Google (4.8) but yes I think nearer to our new place would be better as we're using a Walthamstow removal company too.

Can any of the Bristol folk @AlexD @Matisse @lemonade recommend a surveyor/solicitor please?

I'm sure you've already found these, but by some margin the closest to you seems to be this:

http://leevalleyestates.co.uk/directory/business-listing/storesafe/

(storesafe.com redirects there.)

I guess it must be containers plonked on this large empty site until it gets redeveloped:

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/London+Borough+of+Hackney,+London/@51.5904822,-0.0392435,154m/data=!3m1!1e3!4m5!3m4!1s0x48761cefef8e8c05:0xc5b1fb59d8196f2c!8m2!3d51.5517953!4d-0.0646437

There's also Shurgard in Highams Park, which would tally with Dov's recommendation:

https://www.shurgard.co.uk/self-storage-uk/london/chingford-highams-park

(Oops, missed your reply to Dov.)

We used Shurguard. With the deal you just have to give them 2 weeks notice iirc.

No catch. They’re banking on you turning 1 month into 6 before you know it.

What you want from a storage unit in my opinion is access rights later in the evening / 24hrs.

Big Yellow sent me a refund cheque during lockdown.

I got one from B&Q. After looking at it for 3 weeks and saying I’ll get to the bank tomorrow (everyday), I realised that you can take a photo of a cheque now and pay it in that way. You get the money next day as well.

.

I recently used this place for 4 weeks or so between moves back in December and it was great, would definitely recommended

IMO get as close to the cycle track as possible. Have you looked at the new houses being built at the old chocolate factory?

That’s a great podcast. I too am now scared of keys

You'll probably never actually see your solicitor so I wouldn't be too worried about getting a local one unless they are some local foibles to be aware of. Important to get someone not shit though, makes the whole process much less stressful.

You'll probably never actually see your solicitor so I wouldn't be too worried about getting a local one unless they are some local foibles to be aware of

But... having a local solicitor makes it easier to run paper copies of documents round when they get “lost in the post” ie at reception. Being able to do that saved my exchange last year.

^ this if you really hate the postoffice (you should)

Can’t really help I’m afraid. Last time I had need of such services was 7+ years ago and I can’t remember having strong feelings either way enough to recommend or what ever the opposite of recommend is :-)

@ the 40k kitchen folks - in addition to standard single oven, do we a) get a second oven plus a standard microwave in a cupboard or b) get a combination microwave oven with extra functions and buttons and wizardry