Wow, here we are one day until completion.  I should be happy as larry but in fact I’m anything but.  The journey to get here has been the most stressful and by all accounts we are still not through it…

Winding Back A Week
Firstly despite agreeing to complete on the 16th, at the 11th hour the vendors wanted to change the day so we would end up getting the key’s on the 19th.  This all stemmed from the family members wanting to say “goodbye” to the house.  I can’t for the life of me understand why that had to be done this specific weekend, but there’s nowt stranger than folk…

All in all, this was debated between our solicitors all day and in the end we decided to concede as it was getting to 4.30pm… if it went much later it would have delayed completion and we’d had to complete on the 19th anyway and by this point because the vendors were acting shifty I just wanted to go into my weekend sure that we had the house…

So just before 5pm on the 9th of January we finally exchanged contracts.  11 weeks since my first viewing.

Discovering the flood…
Since our delayed completion I was feeling pretty good, most people say buying a house is stressful and so our purchase had been trouble free bar that little bump in the road.  If that’s was going to be our “drama” we’d still been fairly lucky.  Whilst it had been pain to have to change the completion at the last minute.  The ramifications were pretty minor for us in the short term.  Sure, we’d had to re arrange all our building work as it meant pushing back our starting point by 1 day.   But as I’d  arranged it with the builders in enough time they were fine about it.  Loosing a weekend of having the house gave me some practical problems as we’d planned to use that time to run over the plans with the builders so everyone knew what we were looking to achieve and more specific things like where to place radiators for example.

Fortunately, as part of the vendors agreement to us for changing the date late on they had also granted us free access to the property (when with the Estate Agent) to allow us to plan.   As we had a full on weekend we didn’t manage to get round to it until the 14th.
That Wednesday, I had arranged for my husband and brother to meet myself and the estate agent at the property.

I will never know what made me book the viewing in that day… I just thank my lucky stars that I’d done so as when we opened the kitchen side door we discovered that the entire place was under an inch of water…

It was complete carnage from that point out.  I am unsure what happened next, but it became obvious that someone had left a tap on and the waste water piping had been disconnected.  The result was that rather than overflowing outside into the drainage… the sink essentially emptied out water firstly onto the floor…Then like a wave on a beach spread out into the living room and ground floor hallway… nowhere had escaped the whole carpet was sodden and the water had begun to rise up the wall.. leaving tide marks behind as evidence.

Carpet so wet it has begun growing mould….

Tide marks showing water damage

The dye from the carpets staining the wall like a bruise…

My head was spinning I couldn’t process what I’d seen and had now been faced with…my thoughts in no particular order :

* How did this happen?
* Who did it?
* When was I last here? 10th Dec… maybe a month ago?
* When did this happen? Was it like this at exchange or has it been since?
* The builders… what am I going to do about the builders?!?!
* We are homeless…whose insurance will pay out??

Whilst this was going on the Estate Agent was on the phone to the head office and they were in turn speaking with the vendor and informing the insurance companies…

Trying to put the immediate issue behind us took some doing and we continued to try and plan and complete our intial task.  It was hard not to think of the posideon adventure unfolding downstairs as we went from room to room planning lighting, power sockets and radiators but some how we managed it.

After an hour or so, still not believing what had happened we left our new home with soggy feet and an uncertainty of what our next steps would be.