Open House

by Jane Christmas

  When you find a house on which you want to put an offer, you contact the listing agent for that house. England does not have anything as efficient or collegial as North America’s Multiple Listing Service. If there are ten properties you wish to view, and each has a different agent/agency, then you must deal directly with ten different agents. The estate agent contacts the vendor, makes the offer verbally, and it is either accepted, rejected, or countered. When the price is agreed, no money is exchanged—not a penny. Whereas under the North American system an immediate deposit or down payment formalizes the intent and agreement to purchase, under the English system both parties remain uncommitted. It is akin to accepting a proposal of marriage while both parties continue dating or sleeping with other people. At any point in the process either party can call off the deal without penalty. Madness.

  Second, once your offer is accepted, you order a survey or home inspection. An inspector, without you present, goes through the house you have offered on and makes an assessment. A few days later a thick, spiral-bound book drops into your mail box. Its contents attempt to explain the guts of your intended home, highlighting areas—roof, electrical system, wall structure, foundation, the eaves and drainpipes—that need attention. However, despite the impressive hundred or so pages you receive, and the £600 you have paid to have it done, it is not exhaustive. The surveyor might cast a flashlight in the direction of the attic but often does not actually go into it to check its condition; he or she will regard the roof from the road, not from the roof; a prognosis of wiring and plumbing is based on what is visible. In other words, it is a purely superficial reading of the house.

  If the survey reveals subsidence or other structural issues, or if the improvements you plan to undertake on the property will be more expensive than you expected, you can renegotiate the purchase price. If the seller is set on his asking price, then you can bow out of the deal, and your house hunt begins anew. This process is repeated until you get a survey that does not scare you off.

  You then enlist a lawyer, who conducts a series of searches on the property to ensure there are no liens and to determine whether your intended property is in a flood zone, or if a tin or coal mine lies beneath it, or whether it is subject to a chancel repair tax, or whether it is part of a duchy or has restrictive covenants attached to it. Your home may well sit on land owned by a duke, a prince, or a queen.

  Once the deal is in the hands of the lawyers, you play a waiting game. Eight to ten weeks is the norm before contracts are exchanged. However—and it is a big however—this stage of the house-buying process is still a free-for-all. If another buyer comes along and offers the vendor more money than you have offered, the vendor can accept their offer. You have then been, as the Brits say, “gazumped.” Likewise, buyers can turn around and offer less money to the vendor than they had originally offered. This happens in cases when the market slows or nosedives. But it can also happen when unforeseen expenses appear on your survey (subsidence, roof leaks, failing windows). This is called “gazundering.” A third pitfall, known as “gazanging”—you know you are in Britain when you come up against terminology like this—occurs when, having agreed to a sale, the vendor gets cold feet and decides to remain in the property, leaving the buyer hanging. Or when the vendor complains that he or she cannot find a suitable home to move to. If a home is advertised as having “no chain,” it means the vendors have not entered into a contract to purchase at their end. This is the sort of situation you want, because if there is a chain, then it has a domino effect when someone three places along the chain changes his or her mind and opts out of the agreement to purchase, and suddenly everyone else’s deal is threatened with collapse. This is where the insanity of the system reveals itself.

  In the North American system (and I believe this is the same with the Scottish system) you sign the agreement of sale and submit with it your down payment/deposit. It is done the day your offer is accepted, at which point both parties agree to a closing date, which is when the deeds change hands and the banks transfer the remaining funds to the vendor. It is usual for closing to take place anywhere from five weeks to six months from the date of signing. This means both parties can then book movers; arrange for school transfers, change-of-address notifications, utility cancellations, and hookups at the new address. Under the English system, you are unable to book your mover or undertake change-of-address business until contracts are exchanged, when the sale agreement is then legally binding, which is normally one or two weeks before completion, the day you move out or move in. This creates an atmosphere of such mind-boggling anxiety that who but a clueless Canadian would put up with it?

  Such a system is perfect for commitment-phobes and ditherers, which the British are, by and large. Only when your purchase finally goes through do you begin to appreciate why the British move so infrequently, and why they are a nation of such heavy drinkers.

  IT IS OUR LAST DAY in Brixham. We are definitely moving, and we know that because the proceeds from the sale of our house are now in our bank account. The movers have come and gone. The bits and pieces we dare not trust to movers are stuffed into our small, rusting, pale-green car. The House has been cleaned and scrubbed; each room has received parting prayers of thanks to the spirits. All that remains is for us to bid the town a fond farewell and move on.

  The problem is, we do not have a place to actually move to. We have viewed around sixty properties—a conservative estimate—and have not been successful at securing one because we have either been pipped at the post on houses we wanted or have been unable to find something we could both agree on. As a result, we have taken a rental house while our search continues for a permanent home.

  For no particular reason we have narrowed our house hunt to Bristol. Bristol is where John Cabot set sail for the New World; where the engineering genius of Isambard Kingdom Brunel built the SS Great Britain and the Clifton Suspension Bridge; where Charles Wesley wrote hymns and co-founded Methodism; where Daniel Dafoe’s imagination was stirred to create Robinson Crusoe; where Bob Hope, Cary Grant, J. K. Rowling, and Damien Hirst were born; and where the likes of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Southey, and William Wordsworth settled for a time. Bristol is the home of adventurers and nonconformists. I like to think of myself as adventurous and nonconformist, but then, I am someone who fell for the cliché of living by the seaside, so maybe not.

  We have no connection with Bristol whatsoever, no personal history, no community safety net; we have no family or friends living in or near Bristol; but we have plumped for Bristol because it has history, culture, walking trails, fast trains to London, a diverse population, and an edgy attitude. In other words, it is ideal for us. We hope.

  What I discovered about The Husband and myself while we lived in Brixham is that we are by nature introverts. Small towns are not always best for such people. A low profile is hard to keep in a small town unless you are the surly, curmudgeonly sort. The Husband is friendly, but he is also shy and not a joiner; I am more gregarious: easily talked into going for a walk, a tea, a movie, or having a chat at the drop of a hat. As a writer, however, I also require huge chunks of solitude. It is awkward trying to explain to people that you are in the middle of writing a book or an article, and that you cannot come out to play for another several weeks or months. They never understand, and they think your excuse is lame and that you are just fobbing them off. I work better without social commitments to maintain or disappoint. Ah, but then come the periods of non-writing. This is when my hard-earned isolation is sharply felt, and a desperate craving for company and conversation inserts itself into my personality. Which in turn leads me desperately wheedling my way back into social groups or dropping hints to overseas friends that I am free to Skype and FaceTime. The social life of a writer is one of polar extremes.

  But here we are, The Husband and I, taking our final promenade down the length of Brixham’s breakwater toward the lighthouse. With each step I cement three and a half years of memories in this town w
ith nary a smidgen of sentimentality. It is ironic that I have waited to leave this place as eagerly as I waited to move here.

  It is early afternoon, and out on the breakwater the late-January wind is calm, and the sun is showing the town and coastline to its best effect. It feels like a smug benediction. We are leaving behind good people and easy routines. The Husband has reservations about leaving. He is happy here; and I have thrown his world into flux. My attempt to reassure him sounds hollow even to me: “It is beautiful, but I just cannot remain here,” I say to him with as much conviction as I said three years earlier “We have to live here.”

  The Husband’s needs for our new home are few: a south-facing garden, and proximity to an amiable café that opens early in the day.

  My requirements are less prosaic:

  lots of natural light

  high ceilings

  two bathrooms

  three bedrooms

  a level backyard that is visible and accessible from the kitchen

  off-street parking

  a walkable neighbourhood close to amenities

  not on a main or busy road

  no seagulls

  And that only covers the house. I want to be in a community, near a church and a library, within walking distance of the city centre, places of interest, and unusual shops. I know what I want and I also do not know what I want. But this list will be the framework to keep me on track, to ensure I do not mess up, because, God knows, I cannot afford to do this again.

  What I really want is a house where I can open all the windows and doors and let light and life blow in. I want to hear and smell the everyday—a neighbour’s back door opening; a murmured conversation from some indeterminate backyard; the rustle of tree leaves and the aroma of flowers; the sound of a shrub being clipped, a baby crying and being soothed by a parent; the sweet trill of birdsong. There was none of that in our Brixham house. Quite the opposite. There was always the sense of sealing ourselves from the world. Leaving the house required an intake of breath and a steeling of character because our front door opened directly onto the street and thus lacked one of those small walkways that gently ease you into the outer world. Re-entering the house after some errand or excursion was like returning to prison. The only escape was out the back, through the kitchen door, and up the vertiginous stone steps to where the seagulls, perched like guards along a watchtower, waited to assault us. We were rarely able to open our windows, and even then, the view beyond them was just the bricks on the houses opposite us or the stone wall behind us. We had to crane our necks to glimpse a sliver of sky. I need more of the world than that on a daily basis: I need to see green and blue together. I need to witness the moods of the sky, the movement of clouds, the sway of bushes and trees.

  In North America, my list would be a no-brainer. Millions of homes in our price range fit that brief. Not so in England. The word here is compromise—a word I have had the good fortune never to invoke. In England, housing stock is older and infinitely more varied. It sits on land that has in all likelihood been used in the past for purposes other than housing: industrial, agricultural, ecclesiastical, aristocratic, or royal; land that has been worked or lived on for the greater part of two millenniums. As a result, the terrain twists and turns and dips: it adheres not to a legislated or decreed building or land-use code but to historic undulations, former riverbeds, slag heaps, ancient burial mounds, chancel land. Nothing is standard about English homes, or about British homes in general; if anything, irregularity is the standard.

  Halfway down the breakwater, our mobile rings: It is an estate agent in Bristol. A house she has dangled in front of us for the past month is finally on the market. She can show it to us today at four o’clock. We check our watches. It is two o’clock. We are two hours from Bristol in good traffic, and good traffic is a moving target in this country.

  We turn our back on the lighthouse and speed-walk back down the breakwater, hoping we do not run into anyone we know who might delay our sudden departure. We break into a jog, then a run. The Husband and I bark through our checklist:

  “The house is clean?”

  “Yes, and every room is cleared.”

  “Do we need to set the alarm?”

  “Nope. Told the agent we wouldn’t. New owners arrive tomorrow.”

  We close in on our car parked on the quay.

  “You start the car. I will run the house keys to the estate agent,” I pant. “Meet you at the corner, by the ice cream shop.”

  Minutes later I rejoin him at the appointed place and jump into the passenger seat. Just then a seagull lands in front of our car and struts indolently across the road, taking its damn time.

  “Hit it,” I sneer to The Husband.

  But of course we will not: there are lots of people around, and we do not want to risk a mob riot.

  I open the car door to shoo it away, and it finally takes the hint.

  We are off. Our small car kicks up road gravel as we speed out of town like fleeing criminals, and the ensuing dust cloud excuses us from having to look back.

  The seagulls weren’t done with us. As I punch into our mobile the directions to the Bristol address, a big blob of seagull shit splatters across the windscreen.

  “Bastards,” we mutter in unison.

  5

  The Find

  We arrive at the Bristol house exactly at four o’clock. Miracle time given the notoriously unpredictable traffic conditions on the A380. Make that reason sixteen for our move: you need a private plane if you hope to avoid the congested roads of South Devon.

  Greeting us at the property is our agent. She knows we have seen some sixty houses. Her wry smile suggests she is about to open the oyster containing the pearl of our dreams. This has to be pretty special if she can pull off that degree of confidence.

  It is a Victorian terrace: it is the style we want, which we have seen more times than we care to count. Forty out of the sixty? Possibly. We could walk into a Victorian terrace now and navigate the layout blindfolded.

  The Husband gives the exterior a once-over, pursing his lips as he takes in the surface conditions. I see that the house is standing upright and has all its windows, which at this point is all that matters to me. It is a two-storey double-bay-front style, and the house is clad in what the agent calls “brick” but looks like rough-hewn stone held together with thick mortar. There is a bit of Doric embellishment—gouged in places—around the windows and the door frame, neither of which has seen a lick of paint in three decades—minimum.

  The agent unlocks the door. It swings partially open, banging against a ledge above the door where the gas meter lives. We squeeze in. There is a second door, partially glazed, called a “porch door.” It opens and bangs against another obstruction, this one a wooden shaft painted bright red that houses the wires for the electrical panel. At least, I think it is the electrical panel; it looks ancient. The hall is long, narrow, and dark, with a flight of stairs facing us. Immediately, I notice that the usual architectural feature of a plaster arch with classical details has been ripped out somewhere in its history. Perhaps there is a way for it to be rebuilt and reinstated.

  The first room we arrive at is the sitting room. In days gone by, the Victorians entertained guests here, and unashamedly showed off their prized possessions. It was the lushest, most decorated and architecturally embellished room, the vernacular versions boasting newly efficient cast-iron fireplaces and grates with mirrored over-mantels of wood, stone, or marble, and glazed-tile side panels; high ceilings with deep cove moulding and an ornate ceiling rose; deep skirting boards and window trim. Today, in this particular room, there is no evidence of any of that, only the ghostly outline of a departed ceiling rose. The chimney breast remains, but a board covers up the fireplace cavity, and who knows what horror lurks behind it. The original plaster cove moulding, though battered, is at least intact.

  There are two small sofas and a coffee table between them. A change of layout could allow the room to potentiall
y seat six to eight people.

  The next room, normally called “the dining room” or “second reception room,” is being used as a bedroom. It is not a bad size. The chimney breast has been removed, which makes the room more spacious. A small window faces the side return leading to the rear yard; French doors would be great there.

  We return to the dark, narrow hallway. My heart is sinking while my head struggles to see past the gloom to the house of my imagination. I want to be wowed by a house, but we cannot afford wow—we have to buy shit and somehow turn it into wow. My mind cycles back to the estate agent’s shill that stirred our initial interest in this property: it is on one of the best streets in this part of Bristol, it has a long backyard, the place needs work, the owner has gone into care; it is a sad situation.

  Well, she got “sad” right. The place has suffered abuse. It looks unloved, and it is not loving me back. I detect a stroppy, grumpy vibe, and picture an overweight, gammon-faced older guy in a sweat-and-dirt-stained undervest.

  As we progress, the house gradually, grudgingly, recovers itself: it gives off a sense of apology for its sorry state, while at the same time grousing about having to kowtow to Ms. La-di-dah and her magazine expectations.

  For my part, I feel disappointed—indignant, even. All vestiges of the sort of Victorian charm you come to expect from a house of this vintage—hallway arch, ceiling roses, stained-glass transoms, fireplaces and mantels, cove moulding, sash windows—have been ripped out. The term “architectural cleansing” comes to mind. The walls are yellowed from nicotine, the woodwork battered. The floorboards are black with age and ground dirt; I have seen better in barns. And yet I cannot help but feel immensely sorry for this place. It needs a bath, some better clothes, and love. It deserves tenderness, and a chance to be rehabilitated. Dangerous sentiment, that: it is a short leap from pity to the house-buying equivalent of a mercy fuck.