Nearly ready to go

From Becky – My great friend Sarah asked us last night what we’re most looking forward to about going to France. Jasper said ‘the food and cooking’. I said ‘not having to look after the kids by myself’. Having thought about it a bit, what I’m really excited about is getting to know a new place – a bit like exploring a holiday destination, only we’ll have time to do it thoroughly. When we’re on holiday, we love wandering round a town taking in the sights and facilities – ‘that looks like a nice park/ restaurant/ swimming pool; we could come back tomorrow’. This time it could be more along the lines of ‘This market’s great; let’s get our vegetables here every week for the next five months!’ and ‘Maybe this will be the playgroup where Theo learns to swear in French’. Everything we find out about Manosque will be useful long-term, and if we’re lucky and put some effort into it, we’ll get to know the culture and some people too. I’d like to think that we and the kids will make friends that we can keep in touch with, and possibly visit in the future.

Topbox and Tempers

 

See how the car was packed to bursting point? Well, we had to go back to Oxford to pick up a topbox we’d ‘won’ from eBay, so Shami and Dave rather rashly invited us to make an evening of it and stay the night. We had a lovely meal (thanks Shami) and the kids enjoyed Dave’s oversize bath. All went swimmingly until 4.30am, when Cara and Theo woke up. After a few minutes of screaming fits they were coaxed back into their beds, but then woke everyone again at 5.30. Being charitable, I reckon C&T must be feeling really unsettled with all this travelling we’re doing. At the time I thought they were being a pain in the arse.

Tempers were fraying the following day, but our new topbox is lovely

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.

Packing up our house

Why can we never get things done ahead of time? Why do we always leave everything to the last minute? We’d managed to get a lock on Luca’s room so that we could pack it full of all our things, but it still took a couple of highly stressed days to get everything done. The last of the packing was still being done as the tenants arrived.
The answer is just that it seems more important to keep the kids happy than to pack… until the last minute when Luca can, quite frankly, be left to bawl.
We spent a couple of nights with Kate, Adrian, Ilona and Joe, who also let us fill up their attic space with all the spillage from our house that wouldn’t fit in Luca’s room. Thanks guys!