Let the paperwork commence!

Published on 26 February 2004 in , , , , ,

I am looking forward to this weekend. For the first time in several weeks, I can rest and relax without feeling like I should be trapsing around estate agents, and wandering around street after street. Oh that feels good.

On the other hand, I’ve now got a swamp full of paperwork and phonecalls to deal with.

Mortgage.

Yesterday was phoning up the Halifax to confirm the mortgage – they gave us an offer in principle last September, but now was the real deal.

That was a rather long phonecall, with one heart attack inducing moment when the bloke on the phone said that they could lend us around £20,000 less than we’d originally been told, followed by a "Err… Have you got a different value there?"

Naturally this would have completely screwed up our plans, and whilst on hold for a few minutes, I was in extreme panic mode. Thankfully the wrong credit rating had been entered into the system, and all was fine.

So then it was what seemed like hours worth of talk about getting the right mortgage, but we got there in the end. It’s probably not the cheapest mortgage we could have got.

In fact I’m sure it’s not, but the Halifax was the easiest to get a quote from in the first place – you can get a mortgage in principle online and they don’t ask questions like ‘What is the property type?’ when you don’t actually have one yet. Plus it came out quite high up over a two year period when I did various comparisons, so it will do for now.

Convanyancing.

So how do you find a solicitors? Who do you trust?

I’ll be brutally honest – I’ve heard a lot of bad things in this area. So I came up with a theory.

  1. You can pay a hell of a lot for a good solicitor.
  2. You can pay a hell of a lot for a bad solicitor.
  3. When you take them on, how do you know if they’re good or bad?

So I thought… sod it. I’ll do it on the cheap, for cheap could be bad. Or it could be good.

I got a quote from easier2move and it sounded good. They then arranged a solicitors in Solihul (Harris Cooper Walsh) to take on the case. All arranged online and you can track progress via their website and every time something happens in the process you get an email to let you know. No completion, no solicitors fees.

That was all arranged very quickly yesterday, and today I got my first email from them, introducing themselves and (naturally) asking for money.

Surveying.

The Halifax haven’t even sent me all their gubbins, but the letter from their surveying arm arrived today to arrange the survey – we opted for a level 2 survey (Homebuyer’s Report and Valuation) rather than a full survey as the place is quite new and in good repair. Given that a basic valuation was £285, the extra £215 for the level 2 survey seemed a good idea for the extra information and assurance we’d get.

Wrap Up!

Well here we are. We seem to be moving along – and worse, the cash is coming out already. But it will be worth it, even if it does mean saying goodbye to The Red Lion.