Hey – What’s Going On?

It’s May. Article 50 has been triggered, we have a General Election booked for June and I’m sure there’s some other big news around. Oh yes, we’ve sold our house eeeeek!

We spent a few weeks de-cluttering and doing a bit of decorating and garden tidying just to make the house a bit more presentable, then hit Zoopla and Rightmove on a Friday at 3pm. We had a weekend of appointments booked by 4pm and an offer on the table first thing Monday morning… That must be some kind of record, surely?

Of course, much can go wrong between now and completion so we’re not counting our Chechens just yet, but if it falls through, we had a number of buyers we had to turn away once we’d had an asking price offer – so with luck we’d be able to sell to somebody else quite quickly.  It’ll be a wrench saying goodbye to our family home of 20 years, and to our friends and neighbours, but life’s about moving forward and we’ll take away lots of happy memories (and quite a bit of equity…!)

So what’s the plan?

No, really – what actually IS the plan? At the moment we don’t have a plan – we don’t even have a house to move to yet so we’ll be placing all our worldlies into storage and imposing on all our relatives and friends with Vince space on their drives or in their gardens. We know the area we’d like to live in (we’re moving from the Midlands to South West Scotland) but the house we want is not for sale yet. We found it by chance on a house-hunting visit in March; a neglected and unoccupied house with views of the sea in a popular coastal village. There has been some legal wrangling going on over it for five or six years but this is coming to an end soon (we hope) and it will hopefully be released on to the market before too long.

If we knew for certain when this would be we would pack Vince up and head over to Europe again then return for viewings and a potential purchase. As it stands though, nobody can advise us when it’ll go to market so we’ll stay in the UK for now and wait. And wait. Having said that, Scotland is a great place to be stuck in with lots of Vince potential for travelling around in the meantime. There are no guarantees we’ll get it of course – we may not be the only ones interested, but what will be, will be. Somewhere up there is the right house for us.

We expect a completion date here towards the end of June, which will allow us both to wind up our jobs and oo-err, retire. I say retire, but it will be more of a semi-retirement I suspect as we’ll be on a very tight budget with 10 years to go before state pension age; I can see us doing seasonal work in what is a popular seaside tourist town in summer, then Vince-ing somewhere warm in the winter. Well, we can dream, at least.

In the midst of this whirlwind of estate agents, solicitors, sorting and packing; and the stress and uncertainty of what the future holds – you can probably imagine my popularity rating when I reminded Gill that I have a ten day motorcycle trip planned in a week’s time… Right in the middle of everything. I did consider cancelling (for several nanoseconds) but well, the ferries are booked, some of the hotels are paid for and it would be wrong to let the guys down, now wouldn’t it?

I know this is a Motorhome blog but today I’ve added a new category – Bike Trips – so if anyone’s interested I’d love to take you along for the ride, but only if you promise to wear appropriate protective clothing and stick faithfully to the speed limit.

The fun starts early morning Saturday 6th May when I leave for the ferry at 3.30am (sorry neighbours).

See you then! 🙂

 

About Ken Tomlinson 217 Articles
Semi-retired biker, blogger and world’s best grandad. Doesn’t take life too seriously. Discovered motorhoming in 2015, sold up and downsized to fund more travels. Now with added Yorkshire.

7 Comments on Hey – What’s Going On?

  1. Enjoy your bike trip to France , we leave in 2 weeks for a month , so if we don’t see you before hopefully we’ll see you in late June , unless you’re away with Vince.

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