I have a couple of items to tick off that 26 before 26 list; one being ‘Celebrate my Cousin’s Wedding’ and the other being ‘Move to Molesey’.

Moving to Molsey (so big it has an ‘East Molesey’ and a ‘West Molesey’) was actually a lot more problematic than I had originally suspected. We found a nice little half a bungalow, very close to Pie’s work, which was a bit of a shithole when we looked around; in that the occupants clearly smoked, a lot, and had also drawn on the walls. (We’re told they had a child there. Bad luck for the kid…)

When it came to our moving in day, we expected some grot, but also that the place would have had a tidy and been re-painted, as our letting agents had said that it would be. This hadn’t happened, but we weren’t too put out as we had a poke around during our (first) check-in, since we still had a couple of weeks on the current place before having to move in, and assumed that we could badger the landlord/letting agent into making the necessary changes. Of course, this would prevent us from being able to move any stuff in that weekend, but, well, something has to go wrong, right?

It turns out that almost everything that could have gone wrong, had gone wrong, and bit by bit we found more and more broken, dirty or downright risky problems with the tiny little half a bungalow.

Firstly, the bathroom smelled funny. The toilet lid was lifted to reveal…a poo. Delightful, I know. I tried to flush it, and that was when we realised that the water was off. On the day we were due to move in, there was no water, and a poo in our loo. (Which must have been there for over two weeks, when the tenants moved out. Unless someone had COME BACK just to do a poo.) We searched around with the nice checking-in lady but couldn’t find where to turn the water back on. The letting agents didn’t know either. The landlord? In Spain. “Good think you don’t have the van outside!” the check-in lady said. In-fucking-deed.

The “check-in” continued. One of the windows on the front of the house was open. We had assumed that was due to the redecoration we thought was taking place, but not so. No redecoration, and no way to close the window. From the outside, it looked as though someone had, at some point, tried to lever the window out of its frame with a crowbar. (When we returned for our second check-in, it turned out that BOTH windows on the front of the house had suffered this treatment.) A break-in? Or the previous tenants trying to get back into their own house? Maybe we will never know…

So with no water and a MASSIVE SECURITY RISK, we return to the letting agents, who try to palm all the problems off on the landlord.

The letting agents give us the number of the landlord’s preferred contractor so that we can get the water turned back on.

What we actually did is write a strongly worded email suggesting that they sort everything out, and push back the check-in to a week later which gives them time to bring the flat to a habitable state, and also, a state which they would actually WANT us to return it to at the end of our tenancy, rather than encouraging us to break windows and draw on the walls.

We checked-in again this past weekend, and everything was lovely and painted. The windows closed, but were still broken. The water was on BUT we soon realised why it had been turned off (not that anyone had told us why) when a leak began to seep out from behind the washing machine. We had to waddle the machine out of the flat, and Pie turned the leaking pipe off and stuck a bag over it. (He’s an engineer, dontchaknow).

Then we discovered that the gas card had been lost, and the letting agent told us that we needed to get one from our supplier – they didn’t know who. We did put electricity onto our key (paying off a £5.40 debt the previous tenants had rung up. Thanks, chaps.) and eventually bought a gas key ourselves. Upon putting it into the box outside, nothing happened. No beep, no registration. We call British Gas about four times, who eventually sent someone around (after claiming that our property doesn’t exist on their system – it turned out it was 7c rather than the actual number) who was shocked at the state of our gas box and had to replace the whole thing. When the Sky guy popped round to set our Sky up, he too was shocked at the state of our dish (‘Who ever has to touch their dish?!’) as it too was broken.

…Everything is pretty much fixed now, except the windows, and we are going to finish moving in the last of our stuff – boxes of books, dvds, games, decorative items – this weekend. Once we’ve got some art up, a rug down, and some flowers in vases, I might show you some pictures!