the struggle continues

parliament is voting on the brexit deal today. it's a bit agonising when your future is (somewhat) at stake.

meanwhile, although it seems to keep escaping us, POSSIBLY the end is near with our home buying process. occasionally losing hope as the simplest things just wont get solved, every little thing takes days and weeks to sort. a lot of incompetence in the air too. so frustrating i cant put it into words.

its just dozens of messages like this from our solicitor, dozens of calls from the agent who is trying to mediate between the parties, and even more messages from me to everyone trying to push things forward.  

always something missing. we will chase this and that. we will review responses this week. and so forth.

we finally got the contract documents for signing on tuesday. it doesnt mean much as long as there are open issues but i guess any little step forward is something to be thankful for.

 

the above docs were just a few dozen pages; 

a couple of them required a witness to our signatures but we saw Eve & Mikko last night for board games and it was sorted.

last week we got the Report on Title which is basically a bunch of documents... hundreds of pages: 

 like this:

 here is an exerpt from Water and Drainage Search page 14:

 this is from another document filled by the managing agents;

going through all these docs, all these pages...  its been a lot of reading the past few months. a lot of learning. a lot of face palming.

just yesterday the agent called me in the morning, sort of a tradition now to catch up on whats going on on the vendor side and what has and HASN'T happened...  he tells me our solicitor has sent a list of the remaining open enquiries to the vendor's solicitor but the vendor's solcitor said that it's unclear which issues are open and which not and in general hard to understand so they've just replied back with a "please specify". jesus... we are so close to closing this deal and they go like "meh i dont get it please clarify"?! after the call i receive the files and i look at the document which was sent and its the same bloody thing that's being going back and forth for the past couple months, minus the points that have been sorted. so what sense does it make to NOW say "or we don't understand this". the vendor is also in a hurry to sell so maybe her solicitor should try a bit harder. 

here is a portion of it the open enquiries doc:

i wrote to the agent fuming saying it seems 'dubious' to me that the solicitor would claim they cant understand that if I CAN understand it, and then proceeded to write a translation, ie. simplified version listing the open issues

bloody agent forwarded my email in full to the solicitor who got upset over what i'd said about being dubious etc...and then complained about our solicitor and how it's all her fault... am i dealing with kids here? interestingly enough half of the issues were dealt with within an hour and nearly all of them by the end of the day. so despite upsetting them it served as a spark i guess. hence i'm now hopeful about getting to the end. we did give notice to our landlord last week so that adds a bit of pressure. 

the next step (once all the open enquiries are closed, missing documents approved, signed, sent etc) would be Exchange. that's when both solicitors call their clients to confirm it's ok to proceed then arrange a phone call with each other where they "exchange contracts". im thinking there should be an easier way but what do i know... after exhange our solicitor needs maybe a week to do paperwork (surpise...) after which we can Complete. that means getting the keys, more less.