My parents have been trying to sell their house, on and off, for a couple of years now. It's a lovely house, in the Dorset countryside north of Bournemouth. Semi-detached, five bedrooms, two bathrooms, kitchen, dining room and lounge, big garden, garage. However, it's on a private unmade road and I think that did put some people off.
Today we've had a couple spend two hours looking round the place and they seem very enamoured. So much so that they've given my parents their phone numbers and are coming back on Tuesday to have another look. Seems promising.
Mum's been wanting to move into a bungalow, but they've been unable to find anything in the area within their price range that's big enough, so they're going to have to bite the bullet and get a house instead. They want a smaller place, say two or three bedrooms, which will be easier to look after and more convenient for the shops, so they're off out this afternoon to go round the estate agents and see what they can find.
Moving from a five bedroom house to a three bedroom house is going to be… interesting. At the moment, two of the rooms here are used as offices, plus they have all my junk in the attic as well as all theirs. Obviously lots of stuff is going to have to go into storage whilst we sort our respective selves out.
This does, of course, add a little piquancy to my situation. Although I realise that even if this couple do put in an offer on this house, and even if my parents accept that offer and themselves quickly find a house to move in to, it will still take some eight to ten weeks for the whole thing to complete. It may take much longer, and it may not even happen at all.
Still, it means that I have to find somewhere to live and some way of paying rent within the next couple of months. That's something I wanted to do anyway, but I was prepared for the long haul, prepared to wait if I had to. Things might now be a bit more urgent, but that doesn't mean that there will be any more jobs around for me to apply for. So far, even the jobs that seemed to be perfect for me have come to nothing, and call me a pessimist but I can't see the market suddenly perking up any time soon. If anything, I was expecting things to start to slow down even further in the run up to Christmas.
Don't get me wrong, I'm fully behind my parents' decision to move house – for various reasons it's the best thing that they can do. They won't chuck me out, either, they won't leave me with nowhere to live, but moving all of our stuff into a smaller house won't happen without ructions and it really won't be a particularly ideal situation. All three of us home almost all day every day – my Mum is the only one who goes out to work, and that part time – is fine in a house big enough for us to escape each other, but in a smaller place there will be rows.
I need a job and I need a place to live. I can't say I'm not worried that I won't find either in time.
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