Cracking on

by In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged , , , , , 2 Comments

So, what does a house need to be mortgageable?  A roof – check.  A working kitchen and bathroom.  Er…

Doing a bit of digging, it seems that the definition of ‘working’ is fairly lax and as long as you’ve got a loo and a sink hooked up in the bathroom and a sink and somewhere to stick a microwave in the kitchen, you’re more or less okay.  Mick donned his Mario overalls and set to work on the plumbing.

New loo – this cost £55 from the local branch of William Wilson.  The seat is absolute rubbish, but the rest of it is absolutely fine and I was always intending to put a wooden seat on it anyway, so not a problem.  We have a small issue in that the pedestal for the sink isn’t deep enough to cover the outlet pipe, but Mick reckons he has a solution to that, though he hasn’t told me what yet!

The kitchen sink is also plumbed in and looking good.  I am SO glad I went for ceramic rather than the composite one, though we were slightly nervous when the time came to whack it with a hammer to knock out the disc for the tap hole!  Fortunately nothing cracked.

There’s some slightly complex pipework underneath – feeds and outflows for the dishwasher to the left and the washing machine to the right.

As for me, I’ve been ploughing on upstairs with the painting.  Second coat of primer on the woodwork today, so the aim is to get the white top coat on the woodwork tomorrow and then paint the wall on Friday, meaning that I mask off the white wood rather than the colour, as it seems less prone to peeling off with the masking tape!

I sent David a text yesterday to find out how he was getting on with his new build, and to my delight he finished last Friday.  He’s off to his sister-in-law’s wedding and then has a lamb sale to go to, but will be back with us after that, so that’s either a week today or two weeks today, depending on whether he’s going to Dingwall or Lairg to sell.  I also messaged Dougie, who is off on holiday for three weeks on Saturday, but will be back with us when he returns.  It does feel like the beginning of the end now!

We did it!

by In Ethel's House, Finances Tagged , , 1 Comment

Firstly, apologies to anyone who’s been checking back for an update since Monday, but I was on the point of tearing my hair out – I managed to hold on until 12.30 that day before I caved in and emailed the mortgage consultant at the building society.  I got a reply immediately.  ‘Thank you for your email.  I am out of the office until 4th September.  This email address is not being monitored.  Please contact the branch on [phone number].’

There was language.

I have spent the last four days phoning the branch and leaving my details with the promise of ‘someone will call you back’.  They finally did today, in a most apologetic manner, but they’re currently down 2/5ths of their mortgage consultants due to holidays and illness, so they’re a bit stretched.  The upshot is that the underwriters have agreed a figure for my income to go into the affordability calculations, the mortgage consultant has re-run the affordability calculation and we still pass, so they are happy to offer us the residential mortgage subject to the house being valued by a surveyor from their panel.  However, since my mortgage consultant is away and the deal is slightly complex thanks to the linked commercial mortgage, they’re going to double-check with the commercial side that they’re happy before getting in touch with the valuers and instructing them to make contact.

Fortuitously, the sellers of the house we’re buying were around today and so I was able to go and break the good news in person.  I now have a to-do list as long as both my arms, but it looks like we’re finally moving forwards again.

Frustrations

by In Ethel's House, Finances, Renovations Tagged , , , 2 Comments

Guess what?  The income statement turned out NOT to be the final hurdle.  They decided they wanted to see my 16/17 accounts as well, so my very patient accountant prepared them for me and I sent them off at the beginning of the week – after first checking that this time they’d be happy to have it as produced by my accountant’s software, because HMRC is stopping doing printed SA302s for mortgage applications as of 1st September and there’s a 2-week delay between your tax return being uploaded and them being able to send you one, so I’d fall outside the cut-off date.  The building society passed it direct to the underwriters on Wednesday, who scheduled Saturday for a review of the whole application, but I was told I likely wouldn’t hear from them until Monday.

So I’ve been a bit twitchy this weekend.  The double bedroom has had its second undercoat and the ceiling has had two top coats.  I’m currently about half way round the first base coat on the woodwork – I’m going to give it two coats of primer this time and hope that means I only need one coat of the final Milk Bottle. I also think I might have to re-paint the kitchen a different colour.  It was originally intended to be something close to Farrow & Ball’s Cooking Apple Green, but when the paint in the Crown kitchen range I was looking at online turned out to be much, much lighter on the tester, I panicked and grabbed that Island Blue instead.  But I like the muted dark green so much upstairs that I’m considering trying to find something close to Cooking Apple which will stand up to kitchen wear and tear – or maybe even splashing out on a can of F&B Modern Emulsion.

Nearly finished a room!

by In Ethel's House, Renovations Tagged , , , , , 4 Comments

Latest mortgage update yesterday, for all those crossing their fingers, is that the forecast is currently being considered by head office.  However, they’ve confirmed that it is the final hurdle, so if it’s approved then we’ll be given a mortgage offer in principle.

I’ve been trying to forget about it and get on with the painting.  It took two and a half hours to get into all the little pockets at the top and bottom of the tongue and groove with a tiny brush.  (Sorry, I am still unable to get WordPress to display portrait photos in portrait – I can go to Edit and Rotate and then they refuse to save.  They’re the correct way up before I upload them!)

And then it still needed another coat, damn it!  But it was worth it – I reckon it looks pretty good.  Colours, while I remember, are Crown – Milk Bottle on the ceiling and woodwork, and Crown Period Collection – Promenade on the wall.  It’s a pretty good Farrow and Ball imitation and while it doesn’t have quite that same depth and warm that F&B does, it makes up for it by being £18 for 2.5l instead of £43.59(!).

Certainly a vast improvement on a year ago!

All that’s left to do in that room now is (a) touch up the spots where the masking tape took the green paint off; (b) Dougie to fit the smoke alarm and TV/phone socket; (c) David to fit the door; (d) get carpet laid and furnish it (including a blind for the Velux).

In other news, one of Mick’s colleagues was selling an oak coffee table, did we want it for £100?  Yes please, especially since the drawer handles match the ones I’m using in the kitchen!  (I know where it came from and I think it cost him closer to £300.)

Cross your fingers

by In Ethel's House, Finances Tagged , , 4 Comments

Today could be D-Day for the mortgage application.  Looking back, I can’t see if I mentioned it on here or not, but a few weeks back I got a call from the lender (residential side) to say that they were no longer doing mortgages on properties outside their geographical area, but as we were so far through the process, if I paid the reservation fee we’d be allowed to continue.  So I rang them up and paid the £199 and got on with chasing up my SA302s from HMRC and Mick’s employment reference, both of which were duly sent off.

Then they rang to say that head office couldn’t work out whether my income was on track to be similar to previous years.  Could my accountant please write a letter confirming that it would be, as they were a little concerned by the drop in income between the two years of self-assessment paperwork they’d asked for.  Well, no, she couldn’t, because the sum total of involvement my accountant has with my business dealings is getting a multi-tab spreadsheet around the end of May listing out all the invoices I’ve issued and received for the various pies I have a thumb stuck in.  In all honesty, I didn’t even put her in the position of having to say no – I did a year of KPMG’s graduate programme before deciding accountancy wasn’t for me, and I wouldn’t have done it, or if I had it would have been so heavily caveated as to be basically worthless.

In the end I suggested that I draw up a 5-year income forecast, send it to my accountant along with my data sources and assumptions, make any changes she recommended and then she would write a covering letter saying she agreed my forecast was a reasonable estimate of future income.  My mortgage adviser thought head office would find that satisfactory, so I spent last week working out things that sounded like bad GCSE maths problems:

If you put 42 ewes to the tup in November, how many lambs and ewes do you sell the following year and what is your wool clip price?  Assume 50% of ewes have twins, 50% of all lambs are male, 5% of lambs die between conception and sale, 5% of ewe lambs do not make the grade for retaining as breeding stock, you wish to retain a maximum of 30 ewe lambs, your 5-year-old ewes are drafted out and you get approximately 2.25kg of wool per sheep at £1 a kg.

My brain has not had to work that hard for some time, but I got through it, my accountant made a couple of minor changes and then very kindly wrote me a letter saying she agreed with my forecast income of £22,296.50 for the next 12 months, rising to £46,972.79 in five years’ time!  (These figures are gross income less the holiday let agency fees+VAT, but no other costs have been taken out, as the building society’s number crunchers decided to factor the running costs of all three houses into their affordability calculations, and the other two income source have very little in the way of expenses – my actual take-home will be a lot less than that and I’m going to have to remember to put a lot more aside for tax!)

With all the number crunching it was a nice break to get down the road to do some painting.  Some colour’s gone on the wall in the single bedroom and it’s turned out to be exactly the same shade as my father’s old study in the house I grew up in!

I’ve now got that woodwork primed and hopefully will get paint on it today, which means I’ll have the first room DONE!  (Well, apart from getting the smoke alarm fitted, putting some carpet down and hanging a door, but none of those are my jobs!)

In the meantime, we’re gearing back up for haymaking, although the weather isn’t currently giving me much cause to hope we’ll get it in.  I might have to get someone in to do big round bales and wrap them for haylage instead, especially considering Mick’s having an issue with his hip and won’t be able to spend all day in a hay field carting small bales back up to the barn.  He has, however, made me an impressive new swath board for the mower.  This pushes the cut grass over by about a foot so that the tractor has a line of bare field for its wheel, the stick on top knocks over any grass that’s thick enough to go over the top of the board.  At the moment, the long-range forecast is showing a dry spell 18th-24th August, but it keeps coming and going, so please cross your fingers on the other hand for that!