Loose ends

I wanted to do a post today to boast of all my antics on the ski slopes – about how I raced down a black run riddled with moguls and set the new course record.

But, needless to say, it didn’t happen. We had some neighbours round for drinks the other night and they told us that the slopes are swarming with kids on Wednesdays. Because the schools here are closed on Wednesdays, all the schoolkids go to ski classes. Instead, our guests suggested, we should go on Thursday (today) if the ski report was favourable. Well, it wasn’t favourable, so now we’re going to go on Monday.

While they’re fresh in my mind, there are a couple of loose ends to tie up: both to do with the car.

The first involves the joined-up stupidity of the DVLA in Wales. As previously mentioned, our road tax ran out at the end of December. Because of how poorly we were treated by Direct Line we are now insured by a French company, which doesn’t show up on the DVLA radar. So I called them, at great expense, to ask how I could get a tax disc.

“Oh no,” I was told, “You have to have British insurance to get a tax disc. Let me give you the number of some random insurance broker”.

My blood has been boiling over this issue. After all, all I wanted to do was to give them £150. As it happens, the surprisingly helpful ladies in the Mairie (the council offices) told Becky that there’s no equivalent to road tax in France any more. So, we’ve declared the car SORN (off road) until we return to the UK in April. At which point we’ll undoubtedly have further hassle.

The other car story is to do with the theft of Becky’s handbag. Among various other bits and pieces, her car key was taken. We emptied the car of all CDs and valuables in case the thief happened by – and we had to put the steering wheel lock on at all times. We got a quote from the Toyota garage to see what should be done, and were told that they’d have to re-code the whole car’s security settings, send away for parts and replace all the locks. At a cost of some €850, plus taxes. Oh, and our French insurance has an excess of €400. That certainly wasn’t in our budget.

Luckily, when Becky reported the theft to the local police, they produced the car key and her bank card, which had been handed in by ‘an anonymous personne’. When Becky looked quizzically at the gendarme on duty, he shrugged and said:

“C’etait le voleur” – it was the thief.

Getting ready – admin

From Becky – The last few weeks have been hectic and the last few days in our house were almost too hectic to describe. Now that we’ve been at Mum and Dad’s for a week and I’m starting to get my head together, I’m going to jot down some notes about getting ready – packing, paperwork, setting up a tenancy agreeement for our house etc. Some of it’s pretty dry stuff so it’s probably not worth reading unless you’re planning to do something like this yourself.

Letting our house

I felt we’d left it all a bit late to organise, but if your house is reasonably desirable and you don’t ask too much money, you don’t actually need very long to let a house. Most people looking to rent are on a much shorter timescale than those who are buying and selling; in fact, most of the people who contacted us would have preferred to move in straight away, rather than two months after we placed the advert.

We realised that the market for a six-month let might be rather limited, so we decided to advertise at slightly under market value. We are incredibly lucky to own a house in a very lettable area of Oxford, so even once we’d locked our stuff into the baby’s room, leaving three bedrooms, we could easily ask £1,000 per month. Another bit of luck is having friends willing and able to look after the house for us while we’re away. Our mortgage company set out a list of conditions as long as your arm for letting the house, and the only one we had trouble with was the requirement to go through a ‘professional letting agency’, since we didn’t want to fork out the 5-10% that they’d charge. We haven’t worked out all the tax rules for rental income yet, and it’s possible that you could offset a lot of this admin charge against tax, but in the absence of expertise about this we reckoned it would be cheaper and more reassuring to take up Rich and Charlanne’s generous offers to look after it for us. We decided that Rich counts as a professional lettings agency – after all, he lets out two houses of his own, and the bank didn’t require the agency to be registered.

So, we placed an advert in Daily Information (an Oxford news-sheet) and in the University Accommodation Office about two and a half months ago. The Accommodation Office require a copy of a gas safety certificate before they’ll place your advert and we knew we’d need that anyway, so we got a Corgi engineer round. He had to come back a week later to fit an extra air brick because of obscure regulations about the condensing gas fire in the living room, so that was £200 down the pan, but at least it was quick and efficient, and who knows, maybe it will save us from noxious fumes sometime after we get back.

My friend Shami gave us the tenancy agreement that she uses to let her own house on a standard Assured Shorthold Tenancy, which has to be for at least six months. We customised it a bit; things like making it absolutely clear that it’s a fixed six month period and won’t roll over month by month after that time, and saying that we’ll pay the water bill.

The first person to come and look round the house after we advertised it decided to take it, for himself, his wife and baby and his mother. We let a few other people look round until he confirmed that he definitely wanted it, then took a small deposit to secure it. A few weeks ago we gave them an inventory and they came round and let us know the things they really didn’t want us to leave out. Luckily, they didn’t mind us leaving some books, lots of furniture (we’d said from the beginning that we’d have to do that), a few baby toys and the cot. The remainder of the deposit (£1,000) and the first month’s rent were paid at the time we signed the tenancy agreement and gave them the keys, but another time I’d do the tenancy agreement and deposit a few weeks before the tenancy started, as I kept worrying that they might back out.