Diary: 5. No House & No Van

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 in mind before suggesting a completion date. If we set it for late March, she might just put her foot down, and it would also mean we had to pay an extra month on the mortgage, which, at 5% interest, really wouldn’t have benefited us at all. 

So we arranged to collect the van on Thursday 15th February from the garage, (we bought them 2 crates of beer to speed things along by boosting morale!), and came back to our solicitors with a completion date on the flat of Wednesday 28th February. Yep, 2 weeks from getting the van back from the garage, completely empty, we were going to be moving out of our house and leaving Norwich for good. 

The past 2 weeks had been agonising. 2 weeks of everyone asking how far we’ve got with the van re-fit and how excited we were, with absolutely nothing to say or show for it. 2 weeks of embarrassment that we’d paid for a complete lemon, and were going to pay for it again in mechanics fees. 2 weeks of utter frustration that we had absolutely no way of moving forward until we had the van back. 

Some of the completed welding

We accepted that the van wouldn’t be converted when planned, and aimed just to replace the floor. On the upside, we would have a large amount of space to transfer all our belongings. Thankfully, Matt’s Mum was willing to store all our belongings in her loft and in a shed and allow us to stay with her while we finished the conversion.

The second Matt got off the phone with the solicitors, we got the boxes and bin bags out, and began to frantically pack. So, we’ve now only got the clothes we will be taking in the van, 2 cooking pots and a dresser that we hope to fit back into the van that we can still use. Everything else is either boxed up, going to be boxed up, or sold. We still have an awful lot of packing to do, but we certainly have made a dent! 

It’s now Sunday 18th February. We’ve been trying to get the new floor installed in the van for 3 days, and it still isn’t finished. It seems that at every turn in this project, we’re running into problems. Admittedly, some of them are caused by us. Well, actually mostly by me as I used sealant instead of grab adhesive to stick things down, and then cut the flooring boards the wrong way. 

All we can do is hope that once the flooring is down, building simple frames for the bed, kitchen and dining areas go without too much of a hitch. Because if those things are as difficult as laying the floor has been, we won’t be leaving for Europe in March. Well, we may do actually, March 2019! 

Floor almost complete but enough to move

Jenna x