New year, new home
/Our house sale is now really progressing, it's not sold yet but lawyers are involved, surveys have been done, and we are likely to exchange this month and complete early December. All our fingers are crossed.
It's not been entirely straightforward, our initial buyer's house was not moving so we ended up going back on the market. Somehow without setting foot in the country, without using an estate agent and with tenants in our house we (By we, I mean Ali) managed leads, arranged viewings and got under offer within three weeks. A fourteen year old girl ended up showing round our buyers - who needs estate agents? In fact as with all our previous sale/purchases they have just been a hindrance, this time it's been their crazy valuations in a dropping/difficult market: we've had to drop our price by around 30% from their initial valuations, and our first buyers had their house valued at four times the price of the only recent sold price on their street (they dropped their price 10% but still no movement). Your house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If there's ever an industry ripe for disruption it's that one, we used https://www.settled.co.uk/ which was fantastic.
To simplify our sale, we separated it from our onward purchase. This turned out to be a good thing because unfortunately for us (but understandably) our seller after 26 years in the house wants to have one last big family Christmas there. This means we will be clicking our heels until our move in date is in late January.
To pass the time, after returning to Sunbury to pack up our house in December and saying goodbye we'll be heading back out to Chamonix to catch the early Ski season; I'm praying for snow!! The last two years have seen dreadful snow conditions in Dec/Jan but apparently there are some good omens: It's an el Niña year, it's already snowed in November and it's been a great year for onions in the valley which apparently means early snow. Certainly it looks and feels wintery out here now:
