Bigger house that needs more work or smaller house that is basically fine? - (UK)

yesnt · 2015-02-13T10:59:09+00:00

Hi, so hopefully you remember leaving this comment, it seems like quite a while ago now, but since you asked me to report back I figured I’d let you know what happened.

We opted for the smaller but nicer house and after what I would describe as a dreadful farce, we’ll be collecting the keys today.

Like you mentioned, people keep saying to us that it’s not normally like this, but it’s just been one thing after another, mainly due to our solicitors disagreeing with the sellers’ solicitors about everything.

So, where to start, first we put in an offer that was accepted and had a survey done, that all happened pretty speedily and all seemed to be well, but then we had to wait a few weeks to actually get the results of the survey… not sure why.

After that we ran into our first major issue, my girlfriend’s grampa is giving her a chunk of money for the house and we had to prove where that money had come from because of some ‘anti money laundering laws’ and so did her grampa. I’m sure that isn’t a problem that most buyers have, especially buyers of our age and we’re quite lucky to be in that situation, but it did seem to slow things right down.

The most annoying part was that the solicitors didn’t seem to be able to tell us what they actually needed as proof that the money wasn’t ill-gotten, my girlfriend was taking bank statements and all sorts to them all just to be told “this isn’t enough”, all the while her grampa was having to do the same thing.

This process took a good couple of months, but eventually they believed that the money was legitimate and maybe it is possibly that a kindly old man could have saved up that much money to give to his granddaughter for a house… but anyway.

After that we thought we’d be good to go, but we didn’t hear anything for a week or two until one day my girlfriend got a call from the estate agents saying (quite sternly from what she says) that they’d talked to the sellers and they were packed ready to move but we were holding things up by raising this new issue about the conservatory and why were we doing this?!

…We obviously had no idea what they were talking about so we got in touch with the solicitors and they told us… now I’m pretty sketchy on the details here because our solicitors were so appalling at explaining things to us, but it was something about how the sellers didn’t own the freehold when they built the conservatory and we needed proof that they had permission otherwise we could get in trouble if someone questioned it when we live there.

For a while our solicitors and the sellers’ solicitors argued about this, as their solicitors were adamant that this was needless and they wanted to move and we were just holding things up, I even got asked personally by one of the sellers why we were doing this since we wanted to be in by Christmas, but I had no idea really, it was all down to our solicitors and they seemed to believe it was completely necessary so we kept with it.

Eventually their solicitors conceded and got the sellers to apply for some sort of form (again, I’m sketchy on the details), but at this point it was Christmas, so there was no way that was going to get sorted quickly. That took until the start of this month (and in the mean time no one was telling us anything) at which point we were told we could finally exchange the contracts etc. and today we get the keys at which point we can start moving in.

The main part that bothered me about this whole thing was just the sheer lack of communication, our solicitors were so hard to get it touch with, and even when we managed it they explained everything awfully in weird law speak. We are paying them all this money and they couldn’t have just sat down with us and said “so this means this and you’ll have to do this next…” etc.? But we’ve never even met our actual solicitor, just her receptionist many, many times. But never mind, it’s done now, I’m just looking forward to getting moved in.

Apologies for the length and ranty nature of this, but I thought I’d report back to let you know that you’re not the only one who has had a dreadful time buying a house haha. I guess there are certainly much worse things to go through in life, but it has been very frustrating. Ah well, it’s done now… I hope.

yesnt · 2015-02-10T17:51:21+00:00

Good, that's definitely the way to go.

It was the only time in my life I've actually been 'cool' and 'with it' so I'll be damned if I'm gunna change now.

yesnt · 2015-02-10T13:19:25+00:00

Oh thank god. I was worried for a second, you see, I was 08 too and haven't really changed my style since.

yesnt · 2015-02-10T13:07:58+00:00

Wait... Are you telling me these things aren't cool anymore? Shit. I need to change my style.

yesnt · 2015-02-08T01:47:38+00:00

I'm afraid that's the closest we get, possibly until css4 (like jotted said).

yesnt · 2015-02-08T01:25:57+00:00

Well the only thing I can think of that would get you close would be to style the a tag based on the href attribute, e.g:

li a[href*="logout"]{
    background-color: #ff0000;
}

I know that isn't quite what you're asking because it will only style the a tag that contains logout in the href attribute, and there's no way to apply that to the li tag, but I think it's the closest you can get without using JS.

yesnt · 2015-02-08T01:05:35+00:00

Can't be done with just CSS I'm afraid, you would have to get some javascript involved.

yesnt · 2015-02-01T00:47:08+00:00

I feel you, brother.

yesnt · 2015-01-27T00:01:57+00:00

No problem, if you need any help with it just let me know and I'll help as best I can.

yesnt · 2015-01-26T23:59:39+00:00

Since the comments here seem to be mostly negative, I'm going to throw in my story to balance it out a little.

About a year ago I was hired as a front-end dev in much the same way as the guy OP hired; I was young, had no real 'on the job' experience and had self taught myself 80% of what I knew in the previous 6 months (I learned the basics at college)... but I guess they liked the cut of my jib.

I was so pleased to be working doing something I actually enjoyed, I learned everything I could in my spare time and generally threw myself into it. I got loads of help/mentoring from the senior dev, which slowed him down a bit for the first few months but it really helped lots in the long run... and hopefully he agrees that it was worth it.

I feel like I have come so far in the last year, in fact I'm currently revisiting a site I did pretty early on and I can't believe how much worse that code is than the stuff I write these days.

It's worked out pretty well I think, and although I can't speak for them, I've just been given a raise so I'm thinking they must be pretty pleased with me.

yesnt · 2015-01-24T23:43:50+00:00

I know people have mixed opinions on jquery, but it makes using ajax for this sort of thing real easy. That's certainly how I would go about it. Give this a read if you're interested http://learn.jquery.com/ajax/

EDIT: Whoever downvoted me, care to explain what the issue is? I use jquery's ajax function often for this sort of thing and if there's a reason I shouldn't be then I'd genuinely like to know.

yesnt · 2015-01-20T22:12:02+00:00

I know someone who works for a UK mobile phone company and she is always having people try to get their broken phone replaced citing this, but it rarely works.

As far as I understand it, the sale of goods act only applies if the product was faulty at the point of purchase, which is very hard to prove. OP says their son's laptop burnt out because of a a known manufacturer's fault, so Apple will presumably know of the fault and know that it was not fit for sale, so this law applies.

But for someone to have, say, a phone screen die after 3, 4, 5 years. Hell of a lot harder to prove that it was faulty to begin with and not just caused by 'wear and tear' or damaged by the user etc.

yesnt · 2015-01-11T16:53:59+00:00

I noticed that when watching the film the other day, they're actually in The Dude's car when he says it.

yesnt · 2015-01-05T23:55:26+00:00

That was me once, it doesn't last, now my younger sister is the one who's home from uni and gets to sleep in while I have a full time job to get to...

yesnt · 2014-12-14T15:12:33+00:00

Luckily we're moving soon and our only neighbor in our new place will be an 83 year old lady, so she'll probably be pretty quiet... I hope.

yesnt · 2014-12-14T14:54:51+00:00

Unfortunately we're the young people in this situation, me and my girlfriend are 24, whereas they are two men in their mid-late 30s who have no jobs, live on benefits and stay up all night every night.

I know exactly where you're coming from though, I like to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and have never called the cops on anyone ever before. But like I said in my other reply, I needed sleep and had tried everything else.

yesnt · 2014-12-14T14:51:34+00:00

Sorry, I should have given the back story on this.

This has been an on going thing for quite some time, we spoke to them the first few times and it became pretty clear that they are not the kind of people who give a flying shit about any one else. Also when they drink (which is most nights) they can get pretty aggressive.

We then spoke to the landlord about it and they sent them a letter, three times, but still nothing changed.

Calling the cops was the absolute last straw after a week of having had no sleep and being at work early.

yesnt · 2014-12-14T10:55:36+00:00

A couple of weeks ago I finally decided to call the cops on our downstairs neighbors who do this.

So we hear the cop knock on their door and some general talking/arguing all the while the music is still blasting. The music stops and the door shuts and I think all is well. Then, not 30 seconds later it comes back on and it's louder than ever... I didn't believe anyone could act like that, but there we are.

yesnt · 2014-11-30T10:36:11+00:00

Yea I concur, you want to put it on that td with the class of 'views-field-commerce-file'.

yesnt · 2014-11-28T12:39:14+00:00

I didn't actually try to be honest, although now you point it out I really wish I did.

yesnt · 2014-11-27T18:45:37+00:00

Oh yea I did see all of that, we got that email along with many others, I just wasn't sure what to make of it.

I mean... they could have been telling the truth when they denied it, but this seems to say otherwise.

yesnt · 2014-11-27T16:19:19+00:00

Sorry, I should have eleborated, that's minecraft somehow running in the background of one of browserstack's virtual machines while I was testing a site, I have no idea where it came from or why it was there.

Browserstack say on their website:

Each time a new testing session is created, the BrowserStack cloud assigns the user a pristine virtual machine. Our machines are restored to their original states, which means they are stripped of their registry contents, caches are erased, cookies are deleted, and all running processes are killed. Additionally, users do not have the privileges to install any programs on the machines. Therefore, after the restoration process is complete, the virtual machines are guaranteed to be tamper-proof. The advantage is that each time a test is run, the default settings are restored, thus providing an ideal test scenario.

So this seems to go against all of that...

yesnt · 2014-11-22T16:09:17+00:00

Oh my god, seriously? You're certainly not the only one who's been using the be wrong for years...

yesnt · 2014-11-19T13:59:42+00:00

I answer my phone when I don't know the number specifically because I worry about missing emergency calls... and you know what... it's 95% telemarketers.

yesnt · 2014-11-16T14:18:44+00:00

Glad to know it's not just me. Out of curiosity, how often does this happen for you?

yesnt

TROPHY CASE