The Nice People Thread, No.16: A Universe of Niceness.

Pyxis

Re. mosquitoes....... a mosquito website says:

"There are many species of mosquitoes that can live in breed around or in salt water. Some species must have salt water; some are able to live in both fresh or salt water."


So, I was wrong.

PasturesNew

That's odd... I have a "B List" of places. Just loaded RM for "everything in the whole county in the last 24 hours" to skim through them all before clicking on the map and looking where I'm actually more interested.. and one's come up in my "B List" place. £279. On RM today RM says ... Sold STC.

Something odd went on there. That can't be on today and sold so quick.... nothing else is moving.

No garage, as they appear to have converted that to additional living space. Hate it when they do that. It'd have definitely made my "Short list of stuff to consider if/when mine sells"... although I doubt it'd have stood up under my dismissive eye once I gave the area a good looking over... just a bit "odd" it was on/sold in a day. Maybe been on before or something and they had to put it on the system to mark it as sold.... ah yes, sold prices page shows "previously listed in August 2017". Maybe they're fiddling stats to make the market look good/better, or to make them look good/better.

Pyxis

Number nine sounds like it was quite a moove. :rotfl:

chris_m

GDB2222 wrote: »

That picture above is the main A road round the coast, by the way.

Ooh, a wide one

The main A-road from here to Coniston has stretches that aren't wide enough for two cars or, in a few spots, a car and a cyclist.
The one to Barrow has a few bits where two lorries don't quite fit at once, and one spot where one long lorry (i.e. with a 40' trailer) on its own is a tight squeeze.

LydiaJ

PasturesNew wrote: »

You do realise.... 99% of them will in any case

My criteria for a house are quite different from yours, but I too am the sort of person who rules out the vast majority of houses. I hung on a long time looking for one that met all of my "must haves" and most of my "wants".

GDB2222 wrote: »

There comes a point in the sales process where you actually have a buyer for your house. The estate agent wants his commission, so he pressurises you into taking the offer. (PN, you said these agents are good closers, so remember they need to close both sides of the transaction.)

However, the point of this exercise is NOT to sell your house. The point is to move somewhere much better. Unless you can achieve that, don't sell. You can always sell another day or month or year, and I gather some of the chief causes of nuisance have now gone away, so the urgency has abated.

I agree with GDB. Moving is a lot of trouble and expense. It's not worth doing unless you have a realistic expectation of being driven significantly less nuts in the next house than you have been in the current one. Please don't construe that as saying you shouldn't move. It's clearly a good decision to sell your current house. I just think that since you bought this one as a stop-gap, you should stop the gap with it until you can find a house to buy that's definitely better than a stop-gap, although obviously not perfect, because no house is.

PasturesNew wrote: »

Just need to move on... to somewhere without such a parking situation, where what's a border/boundary is clear and obvious and can be installed/amended.

You can't get rid of all potential nuisances... but some need to be avoided.

Absolutely. The key is to identify which nuisances are deal breakers and which are negotiable, and then to hang in there waiting for a house with no deal breakers, even if that means that moving takes longer than your EA would prefer. They work for you, not the other way round.

ukcarper

GDB2222 wrote: »

I have no idea about the area. Do you get more house for your money a few miles inland from the coast?

In N Norfolk, we're a mile from the beach, but that oddly limits our choice of which bits of the coastline we can visit. The coast road is very slow, especially in peak holiday season.

If we were say 30 miles inland, we'd be able to reach virtually any part of the coast of N Norfolk in half an hour, whereas for us to get to the far end of the coast takes an hour from where we are.

I had to give up once, when Stiffkey became gridlocked. Lorry going one way, and a bus the other. Nothing moved.

I can think of a lot worse place to be held up.

Jackmydad

GDB2222 wrote: »

I have no idea about the area. Do you get more house for your money a few miles inland from the coast?

In N Norfolk, we're a mile from the beach, but that oddly limits our choice of which bits of the coastline we can visit. The coast road is very slow, especially in peak holiday season.

If we were say 30 miles inland, we'd be able to reach virtually any part of the coast of N Norfolk in half an hour, whereas for us to get to the far end of the coast takes an hour from where we are.

I had to give up once, when Stiffkey became gridlocked. Lorry going one way, and a bus the other. Nothing moved.

Lots of nice places around there. I really like Wells-Next-The-Sea.

LydiaJ

chris_m wrote: »

Much easier with a driveway, I just put my bin at the end of it. They never put it back there, though - they always take both my bin and my neighbour's one and load them both on the back of the wagon (2 lifts), then put both back on the pavement roughly halfway between the two gates.

Here they come very early in the morning, and then usually put the wheelie bin and food caddy, or else the selection of different coloured things for different kinds of recycling, right in the middle of the pavement end of my driveway ideally positioned to get run over when I reverse out to take DD to her bus stop.

PasturesNew wrote: »

Just seen one and added to the list, 270, very dated, but could be worked on. Easy room for en-suite (already has a window), conservatory, needs new flooring throughout (which, at that price, is not a problem as there's money for it and the flooring I prefer no house has at present) ... so that's on the list.

Sounds promising.

PasturesNew wrote: »

Railway line at bottom of garden, but it's a long enough garden and trains don't bother me.... quite cheery (er, once I've checked what sort, what speed, how often and if I'll have 300 faces peering in every 10 minutes).

Agree - I wouldn't mind trains if the garden were reasonably long.

PasturesNew wrote: »

Fact is ... everywhere has its issues doesn't it - and when househunting we can never see anything we actually like/could live with .. until we're bent over a barrel and have to choose.

That's not how it was for me. I had a list of criteria that ruled out almost all the houses available, but over a year or so of watching the market in my target area before I was in a position to proceed, I indentified two I liked quite a lot. Both "sold" and disappeared from RM, but the one I liked best of all was in a chain that collapsed, so the sale never completed. A few months later when I was finally proceedable, I contacted the owners to see if they were still interested in selling, which they were. They got it revalued, and were told it had gone up by £75k over 8 months of a flattish market in this area, while I had a survey done that valued it at its previous asking price, and advised me to begin by offering £5 under and be prepared to go up a bit. That wasn't going to be negotiable, so I went off and looked at other houses but couldn't find one I liked, and my two attempts to buy smaller houses and extend came to nothing. Meanwhile, my favourite house was failing to sell at its silly price and gradually dropping in price as it moved from agent to agent while the market was rising to meet it. I finally bought it a year or so after I first contacted them for £45k less than the silly price, and they'd done £10k of work in response to my survey too.

So there are people who "fall in love with a house", end up buying it, and still love it when they're living in it. It took a long time, but there was no way I was spending hundreds of thousands of pounds on a house that wasn't going to work for my life and my family. By then I'd lived (as an adult) in one rented flat, one tied house, and four rented houses, none of which were "what I'd have chosen", but they were temporary (max 6 years). I was happy to settle for what was available at that earlier and more transient stage in my life, but not for a house I own and expect to live in for decades.

LydiaJ

GDB2222 wrote: »

https://www.express.co.uk/expressyourself/356253/The-sad-story-of-the-Vicar-of-Stiffkey


A nice bit of salacious gossip for you. Not that I'm interested in such things, of course.

Poor guy.
Times have changed. At the party after my sister-in-law's ordination, I sat next to a friend of my brother's who's also ordained. This friend and his wife were living in a vicarage in the middle of the red light area of a sizeable city, working mostly with addicts and sex workers, and nobody batted an eyelid.

GDB2222

There's nobody in our street using the food recycling caddies any longer. Unfortunately, the foxes worked out how to open the lids, and we all got fed up with rotten food scattered round the streets and our gardens.

Previously, we were told to put food waste in the green garden waste bins, and that worked well for us. However, I expect the composting centres were over-run with vermin.

So that's how Barnet works. Something needs changing, so change it, but don't worry if the changed system does not work.