adventures in housing, part eight

[Previously in this series: invasions, evictions, and something else that sounds snappy. Let's finish this thing.]

We started searching for our next home. I had dreams of moving back to the area where this story started, the area I'd lived in comfortably for two years, that had everything I needed and felt like home to me. At first my flatmates were willing to indulge me, and we looked at a few things around there. We got unreasonably attached to a flat we called Robert which they wouldn't let to us. We tried to make an offer on a place in a beautiful building with a lovely kitchen, but the lettings agent repeatedly refused to call us back after we expressed interest and let it to someone else instead. We saw a maisonette with an enormous roof terrace and beautiful living room, which came with a slightly terrifying landlord, a third bedroom barely big enough for a dog bed, and a single-person kitchen with no oven. We debated for days over taking a ratty little flat on an estate which stretched the upper limits of our budgets because I was so excited about proximity to a Zone 1 tube in the area I loved. After that, the other two gave up on my dream and started looking elsewhere.

The house we were leaving might have been owned by a crazy person, but it did have a clean and spacious kitchen and bathroom, and it was hard to go from that to the kinds of things that were on offer in any places that were even vaguely accessible. Sinks missing vital components, ovens that rattled ominously when anyone came within seven feet of them, toilets that appeared to contain the aftermath of someone setting fire to a crocodile. My flatmates, who didn't have quite the same dance-focused transport-dependent schedule, started looking further and further out to find nice places within our budget.

Them: What about this place?
Me: It's in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's so cheap!
Me: There's a reason.

The first Leytonstone place was easy enough to reject. It was a long way from the tube station (which was a long way from anything I considered to be civilisation), it was dark and cramped and unpleasant.

Estate agent: [pushes door open] This is the master bedroom.
Me: Huh.
Mostly-naked man on bed: Uh, hi.
Estate agent: Of course there's more light in here when the curtains are open.
Me: I - hmmm.
Mostly-naked man on bed: [nods to me and covers his lower half with duvet] Yep.
Me: OK, I think we're done here.

The second one was harder to turn down. It looked large and well-maintained and pretty in the photos, it was under budget, and it was three minutes' walk from the tube. We sat outside in the heat (hey, remember that? When it was all hot last summer?) waiting for the estate agent.

Me: Guys, I really don't want to live in Leytonstone.
Them: But it's really pretty and cheap!
Me: I go to a lot of late-night social stuff and getting back here would be an absolute nightmare. It would take hours.
Them: Well, we stay in a lot, so we want somewhere nice.
Me: I get that, but literally the one thing I said I wanted was somewhere accessible.
Them: But it's pretty and cheap.

Sitting outside that house, I felt dread build up in my stomach. I can't live here, no way. But if it's as pretty as it looks in the ad, they're going to want to take it, and I'm going to have to say no and then there'll be fights and they'll hate me. We waited, and I panicked, and we waited, and I panicked, and we waited, right up until the estate agent called my flatmate to say that one of their other properties had exploded and they wouldn't be coming after all (yes, there are two exploding properties within one year of housing drama. At least this one worked a tiny bit in my favour).

We stopped looking in Leytonstone, but time was running out yet again. We started looking for rooms on our own in case we needed a back-up.

We got another viewing. The house was on the side of London none of us had lived in. It was old fashioned and the landlord was slow-moving to the point that I thought he might have been doing it on purpose as a psychological experiment. But it was a house, and there were two full bathrooms between three of us, and fruit trees in the garden, and it was inconvenient but manageably inconvenient, and we would get a proper tenancy agreement, and we were the first people to see it and the slow-moving landlord liked us.

My flatmate was conflicted. She hated it. She couldn't even pinpoint why, except that it smelled funny. She really didn't want to live there, but we only had a week left until moving day. There was almost no chance we'd find somewhere else where we could all live together. She decided she couldn't take the risk, and we made the snail-landlord an offer. He accepted us.

We packed up for the move across London. Convinced that our ridiculous landlady or her proxy would comb the place looking for reasons to deduct from our deposit, we hired a cleaner then cleaned the whole place again twice after she'd gone. I broke a glass and panicked that she was going to charge £300 for it. We worried about the state of the pans, the bathroom grouting that wasn't done properly in the first place, any scuff or scratch mark we hadn't documented when we first got there. We were convinced we would be living in abject poverty for months while we tried to recover from the loss of our deposits.

The landlady's husband came to see us out. He seemed normal. He had completely normal conversations with both of my flatmates, but treated me like a slightly dangerous dog, trying not to speak to me or make eye contact or attract my attention with sudden movements. I wonder what she'd told him about me. Maybe as far as he was concerned, I was some kind of ghost that had acquired the ability to communicate with the living and get a bank account. We loaded up our van, said goodbye to the house and the street and the whole of South London and left forever. To my utter astonishment, my full deposit landed in my account several days later.

Me: She's given it all back!
Flatmate: I know. Don't ask any questions.
Me: But we broke a glass! And we replaced the mattress protectors with Primark ones.
Flatmate: Shut up! She might be listening in somehow.
Me: How?
Flatmate: Maybe she bugged us.
Me: She certainly bugged us.
Flatmate: Shut up.

We settled in to our new home (after cleaning the smell out), and eight months later we're still here. We've not heard anything from our landlord since last year, and are working under the theory that he's dead but because he moves so slowly nobody's noticed yet. It's OK here. I miss convenient bus routes and wooden floors and the ridiculous fuck-off living room in the mansion and kitchens with space in them, but it's OK. My room is my room. I've been able to settle in and spread out and accumulate crap. It might be a long journey home, but I know where I'm going. The landlord might be slow, but the novelty of having a landlord stay the hell out of the house still hasn't worn off. I'm comfortable, and comfort is something that's been missing for a long time.

So concludes my adventures in housing. It's been interesting, going back over it all and writing it down and remembering everything. I almost enjoyed it. But that's enough. It's done now, right? This is all the housing upheaval I've been budgeted for this lifetime, and I'm looking ahead to decades of really, really boring house moves and living situations. I'm sure that's it.

The End. (Please.)