Gimme Shelter

 We started looking in earnest for a house to buy in September. 

September, 2019.

The third one we saw on our very first day, after the nice one on the too-busy road and the adorable cottage TH couldn't stand up in, was really lovely. But not perfect. The downstairs bathroom was slightly smaller than the toilet on a Greyhound bus, and the upstairs bathroom needed a new shower. I couldn't figure out where I'd put the litterbox, which is always my proxy for the general feng shui of a place. And it was our first day! So we kept looking. 

(Yeah, we were fucking idiots. In our defense, a Frequentist approach would suggest that if there's a gem in a sample of 3, keep digging. We do, of course, live in a Bayesian world.)

(And yes, I'm out of my depth. I think 'conjugate priors' are married clergy.)

Of course, the housing gods had given us that gift of a first-day find, and the housing gods were unhappy that we rejected it. And so, we have sailed lo these many months, occasionally catching a glimpse of Ithaca only to be blown back out to sea.

More prosaically: we did end up offering on that house, but not until after it was withdrawn from the market. The sellers thus demanded more than full asking price, which caused TH to get livid and email imprudently, which, yes, might have cost us the house, but it's difficult to stay upset about this because I have never seen TH more than mildly annoyed, so it's hard not to conclude that the situation warranted it. At one point, we were £5000 away from the seller's price. And we walked away.

In our defense, we are fucking idiots.

We had an offer accepted on another house, Chapel Gardens, this past September -- we didn't love it, but it was practical and peaceful. We spent several thousand pounds ushering the ridiculous purchasing process toward its glacial conclusion. Sometime in November, I bought a crate of packing tape off Amazon, ready to start putting books in boxes that weekend. That evidently caused our solicitor to write to us: the sellers have only owned the house since August. Well, yes; we know that: they're flippers. But they seriously underpaid for it. Okay: good for them. Nothing to do with us. It's a fair price, and we're not asking for a discount. Soooo the original seller might change her mind. Should this unlikely event come to pass, it could cause lots of red tape. Therefore, we're obligated to advise your mortgage company not to lend. Wait, seriously?

Never refuse a gift from a housing god.

The lawyers and the mortgage company decided that the best made-up solution to their made-up problem was to impose an arbitrary six-month waiting period. We wanted to move before then -- we're in a small rental house on a month-to-month contract, and our landlord wants to sell it -- so we moved on.

I mean, we tried to.

The problem with the Bristol housing market, I tell people, is that it's perfectly bimodal. The most common property is a 600-square-foot 4-bedroom flat with hot pink wall-to-wall carpet and cheap honey beech-colored laminate on the countertops, walls, and ceilings, and it costs £300,000. There are also 4000-square-foot Gothic fantasias of stone and soaring skylights that start at £1.4 million. There is nothing in-between.

Anything in our price range is either an extended version of the first category (extra rooms with two-inch windows and textured ceilings) or is the latter with something that makes it unsellable -- next to a prison, or directly underneath a pylon, or some such. So, naturally, we've been indexing acceptable fatal flaws. Next to a prison means no partying students, right?

There were plenty of houses in that category during our pursuit of Chapel Gardens. By the time we were booted out of that, they had all disappeared. Between proliferating deadly virus variants (Bristol now has its very own) and the sunsetting of a government-subsidized purchase incentive, the firehose stream of new listings has turned into fitful drops. I used to run five searches daily, one for each neighborhood we were interested in, to make sure I didn't miss anything new among the number of pages returned. At some point, I started running one search daily, simply for "Bristol." I now run a search for "Bristol + 10 miles." There's usually a page per day, with sometimes one property in our price range, and nine times out of ten it's outside commuting range. (That's a whole other issue: TH works on the northern fringe of town -- the "yikes" end -- and traffic through Bristol is truly awful. He already works long hours, and I fear that if we didn't limit his commute to under 30 minutes, I'd never see him. This sharply restricts the areas we can consider.)

Chapel Gardens didn't sell during its waiting period -- we couldn't get a mortgage on it, but neither could anyone else. Not long ago, we realized that the six months was two weeks away from being up, and we re-offered on the house. The seller was interested. And then a cash buyer swooped in out of nowhere and snatched it from our grasp.

Anyway, part of this blog on learning to feel at home in England is thus necessarily going to be on finding a home in England, about which, at the moment, we're frankly pretty glum. TH is off work next week and we're going to do another big housing push. Which might last an afternoon if more listings don't appear between now and Monday, but just so you can play from home, the current slate is:

1. Henleaze. Fantastic central neighborhood. Large (for Bristol) floorplan. No garage (not a must-have, but helpful for storage when you're combining the households of two adults who have lived alone for decades), tiny awful kitchen, generally dark and tired-looking interior; damp patches on the ceilings. Also attached at the hip to an identical house of unknown nature and noise level, and we really, really, really want a detached house -- we're in a "semi" now, and would strongly prefer not to renew this arrangement. Also? We can't actually afford this one. We'd have to offer the tippy-top of our budget, which would leave us no money to do the cosmetic and possibly more substantial updates this place urgently needs. 

2. Pilning. Wonderful house, and comfortably within budget. Regrettably, it sits in the crotch of a major freeway and a six-lane highway. It's a good ten miles from Bristol, on the outskirts of a grim and impoverished small village (offerings: one convenience mart) in the middle of an industrial zone. It also isn't connected to municipal services, so that means an oil tank and a septic system (so no vegetable garden, thanks). I will be an absolute prisoner until I learn to drive and get my license (which are currently not gettable under lockdown), and we worry about how well I'll take to driving under even the most optimistic scenarios.

3. Clevedon. Very sweet cottage-- oh, wait. I went to go retrieve a photo of this one, in a lovely seaside village 20 minutes outside Bristol and suggest it was our best and most likely option, but I see now that, since last night, it has sold. Fuck.

We are doomed, but I'll update here, and, in the meantime, if anyone knows any tips for appeasing Poseidon, please share.