Two utterly undistinguished houses. The first a Victorian terraced ëcottageí ñ two bedrooms, a bathroom, a knocked-through living room & dining room, a tiny kitchen, a short, narrow scrap of garden. Itís situated on the wrong end of a residential road, flanked by other such terraced houses, just above a crossroads between the busy A 505 & a broad street leading into the town of Hitchin. Emma bought it in 1997 as a home for one & itís now the capital behind our purchase ofÖ
Öan ex-council house in the village of Great Offley, just outside Hitchin. It was sold for the first time during the Thatcher years when the Iron Lady released low-rental municipal housing ñ all that many families could afford ñ for sale to their owners (an asset-stripping manoeuvre from which house-seekers on lower incomes still suffer today). It has three bedrooms, a bathroom, a knocked-through living room & dining room, a tiny kitchen & a relatively wide & long garden opening onto a strip of common land beyond which lies a field partially cultivated into allotments. The house is situated in a small cul-de-sac flanked by council & ex-council bungalows. Trees line the road & the village is surrounded by fields & open country.
We have been in negotiation for the Offley house for three months now. Itís all we can afford & have enough money left over to adapt it to our needs. The plan is to knock out the kitchen wall & have the entire ground floor open plan. At the bottom of the garden weíll put up a prefabricated 10í x 12í wooden studio/office into which will go most of the books & the computers. If I can get planning permission I shall erect the 40í telescopic mast for my ham radio antenna.
Or not. We learned on Friday that the current owners of the Offley house have fallen into mortgage arrears &, unless we are able to exchange contracts with our purchasers tomorrow, at 10.00 am on Friday the ownersí building society will repossess the house. For the past three days we have been in frantic negotiations with purchasers, building society & the vendors. All was falling into place until, this afternoon, our building society surveyor rejected a report submitted on building work done to the house three years ago as insufficiently detailed. Since the building society wonít release the money weíre borrowing until theyíre satisfied that the house isnít going to fall into the street, we may well be unable to beat the repossession deadline & will in consequence lose the house. Tomorrow morning I have to make a series of carefully timed, strategically aimed ëphone calls in pursuit of the appropriate detailed certification so that it can fall on the desk of the building society financial department in time to forestall the repossession.
The ultimate irony in the entire sorry business is that the building society from whom we have obtained our mortgage is the Abbey National & the building society to whom the current owners are in mortgage payment arrears isÖthe Abbey National. We are faced with the prospect of losing the house to the very building society that granted us our mortgage to buy it in the first place. And no, they canít ñ or wonít ñ simply stay their hand in order to let the deal go through. Regardless of circumstance, they will proceed with the repossession & then immediately set about the process of placing the house back on the open market for the highest price they can get. So we have about eight hours tomorrow within which to obtain the acceptably detailed document & get in front of the fund holders, who will then release the money & enable the transfer of the house to us, thus forestalling the repossession.
Watch this spaceÖ
11:04:06 PM 
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