Gibbs Gap Year

On Monday 11th February, we had a phone call from our solicitors. “The buyer would like to set a completion date, and she would like it to be on the 23rd February”.  Back in December when we were making the original plans, that would have been great. But at this point we didn’t even have the van in our possession. It was still in the garage!  We had begun sorting through the cupboards, donating to charity and selling things in good condition along the way. We are aiming to downsize anyway, so why not see what we’ve been living with for years that we could’ve gotten rid of. But we were in no way packed or ready to move.  There was a lot of tooing and froing between us, the garage and the solicitors over the next couple of days, as we tried to make some sense of when we could actually make this happen. In the back of our minds, we were always remembering that until we have exchanged contracts, the buyer could back out, penalty free. So we had to keep that...

Hindsight is a wonderful thing.  The call with the offer on our flat came as we arrived at the van viewing, and there’s a large possibility that the endorphins of selling the flat so quickly, which got the ball rolling, steered us towards putting that deposit down on Boris. We wanted it to be the right van so that’s what we convinced ourselves.  In hindsight, we should’ve held off and slept on the decision. But there you go, you live and you learn. In all fairness we did the same thing when we bought our flat, we got the gut feeling and made an offer the same day. Luckily it all worked out with the flat. Yes, it needed some work doing, and yes it was an absolute bloody nightmare, but we still sold up just 2 years later for a profit.  We only discovered how much of a nightmare the van was going to be when we took it into the garage for a pre-MOT check. There were still 5 months on the MOT, but we thought if we had an MOT-like check and major problems were fo...