Seems it’s a lot more tedious to unpack life back out of boxes again than it was tidying them away in the first place.
Ady went off with Dad this morning, theoretically for an hour or so but actually for more like 6 hours. That was fine as I had plenty to be getting on with from my rather long job list. This included such delights as booking eye tests, smear tests, blood donor appointments, trying to tax my car (insurance still not appeared as active on the direct.gov site despite paying for it online last night) and reading up about landlord and tenants rights in law. I sent a round of texts and emails to let various people know we are back and arrange to get together – am doing this in staggered waves to ensure no double booking with people on our Priority Visiting list with people lower down 😆 Got a very good response to that and have been invited for lunch tomorrow (said no), dinner and sleepover on Sunday, Reading Group Christmas meeting, picnic in the park, moonlit chip supper on the beach, van space on drive for a few nights and various others. Diary is filling up nice and quickly :). I rang an estate agent and emailed the letting agent and spent ages working out our remaining debts and going through various communications from creditors while we’ve been away.
Our plan is to make offers of around 50% to creditors (have asked CCCS who manage our debt on correct protocol for making offers), rising to 70% which seems to be the normal accepted final settlement type figures. Dad is prepared to short term loan us the money to clear them, to be repaid when we sell the house. This means we are instantly £300 a month better off and gives us some breathing space once the tenants have moved out if the house does not sell straight away.
We’ve decided to give the tenants notice at the end of this month, they get 2 months so will be leaving at the end of January. We can then clear the loft and the garage and any remaining chickens (no idea how many are left there, fully expecting this to be a source of trauma for the kids at some point soon), tidy up the garden, give the house a good clean and a lick of paint (hopefully mostly covered by their deposit if they leave it needing lots of attention) and then be selling an empty and clean house leaving keys with the agent for maximum ease of appointments. The agent I spoke to today knew our road and said the market is pretty good down here with an average of one house sale per day at the moment so that is reassuring that it won’t be months and months before it sells. So, an uncertain future but at least one with a plan for all our variables.
I also sneakily put a wash on 🙂 Mwah ha ha!
Meanwhile Davies and Scarlett were lost in the land of rediscovered toys, blissfully unaware that they were once more orphans to the internet! When I realised it was nearly 2pm we made lunch and Dad and Ady arrived home just as the kettle boiled so they joined us. I brought them up to date on all my mornings work and then Ady and I walked up to Sainsburys for dinner stuff and the kids came with us. Davies is much better today but they are both strugging to adjust to not having Ady and I around all the time. This is the second night I’ve sat with them at bedtime. I know they will get used to not all sleeping in the same space (and infact they are still sharing a room) but I guess it will take some time. Honestly, you’d think they’d be desperate for their own space!
Back at home I had a bath and then spent far too much time messing about with photos. I had this idea it would be nice to somehow hook the laptop up to my parents huge big screen TV so we could show them all our photos from this year. I think it would be great for us four to see them all in one go too, so we’ve been looking at cables but they seem to cost about £20 which is more than I wanted to spend on something we’ll probably only use once. I then thought I could put all the photos onto a camera card as we do have a lead that connects the camera to the TV. After a couple of hours selecting photos and moving them about though we realised the camera only plays back images taken by it, not jpeg files off a card in it. So that didn’t work. Grr. We did get to watch a couple of video clips that Davies took on Rum on the TV which was nice, but rather more brief than the slideshow I’d been anticipating.
Think we might just buy the bloody cable tomorrow!
Dinner was nice. Ady and Dad watched football, I carried on messing about with photos and Mum went to watch a film upstairs with the kids. I think she is mostly enjoying having us here despite our mess and noise (and laundry!) 😉