When I came back from Holiday the latest BT bill was waiting for me on the door mat. They have charged me £105+VAT to establish my phone line - something they promised that they would not do. So not only did they incorrectly handle the phone move they also screwed up on the billing.
I HATE BT!
posted 13:00 ::
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This morning I received an email from a rightmove automated search suggesting that I may be interested in the house I use to live in. We were forced out by a greedy landlady who wanted to sell up and extract the capital that had appreciated in the house. At the time of the eviction she offered us the property for £225k (US$450k), which I thought was completely over the top. In the subsequent months she has paid two more months of mortgage repayments, the builder's bill to tart the place up and the loss of two months of rent. The house is now on the market for £10k (US$20k) less.
Ha! Ha!
posted 09:00 ::
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Today when I got home there was a letter from my bank. They have decided to automatically triple my overdraft limit, if I don't want all this cheap credit I can reply using the pre-paid envelope to let them know. It's very nice to know I can borrow a lot of money for very little it's even occasionally useful. However as I'm a tight northerner I avoid debt like a plague and doubt I'll do anything with this extra line of credit.
What is more annoying is that they sent it to the wrong address, we moved a month ago. It's not as if they don't know I have told them and they have already sent a statement to the new address... It must be brilliant if you are an ID thief to get a letter like mine...
Methinks the banks have only themselves to blame...
posted 21:20 ::
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When we moved house I completed a postal redirect form with the Post Office. I paid good money for them to redirect post from our old home to our new one. We happen to know the builder working on our old home at the moment and he keeps dropping off post that the Post Office haven't redirected. I'm not happy with the Post Office, I send a complaint but they would probably lose it...
posted 13:33 ::
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At long last we not only have a phone line but we now have an ADSL service too. Nildram even managed to get in enabled a day early! It only took less than an hour to update my two Debian Lenny boxes and one Debian Etch system, which just leaves one Etch box yet to update. We don't live as close to the exchange as previously, so we only get around a 6 MBit/s connection rather than the 8 Mbit/s we use to get but we are paying less for the contract so I don't care too much.
posted 16:48 ::
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Next weekend we will have ADSL at home again after the inconvenience of the house move. The Debian stable boxes won't need much of an upgrade but I suspect the Testing/SID systems will be bandwidth hungry for an hour or so.
In the enforced absence of Internet at home I've watched plenty of TV and seen the odd DVD. On balance I'd have to say that I miss the Internet more than I miss the TV, DVD being about in the middle.
posted 13:08 ::
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We have rejoined the 20th century at home. It only took BT a mere 12 days to move our telephone number from one house to another on the same exchange. In all honesty the chap that came to the house to put the land line in was very polite and helpful.
It will now take my ADSL provider a further 7-10 days to reestablish a useful Internet connection, giving me about three weeks without a network connection at home.
posted 13:34 ::
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I hate BT, they are the most useless of all the utilities I've ever had to deal with. They are lazy, sloppy and a virtual monopoly so they have no pressure to get get better.
Last week I asked them to move my land line from one property to another in the same village and hence on the same exchange. Even though it should take no more than 30 seconds to re-program an all digital exchange I was warned it could take up to 2 days. After three calls to complain that the move still hadn't happened yesterday they announced that there wasn't a phone line to move to so it would have to be an engineer visit some time next week.
The only good thing they managed to do was to waive the £130 connection fee. However I'll have gone 11 days without telephone and it will be another week after that before my ADSL line will be available.
In the past it took them over a fortnight to fix a broken line and even then they turned up unannounced on a Sunday morning to fix the phone, when the problem was in the street.
I Hate BT
posted 09:21 ::
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On Saturday we moved into our "new" house. It's over 70 years younger than our previous house. Compared with the previous house the build quality is dreadful, it's smaller and the layout is stupid. The rent including garage is less than previous, so we can put up with things for a short while until house prices have sufficiently adjusted to make buying a house feasible.
We've sent a long list of initial snags of to the landlord's agent to fix. Leaking roof and radiators are one thing, I doubt they can fix "rooms to small" or "missing garden"...
Of the utilities, the gas and electric are sorted, the phone is still no active and we are now beyond the 2 day transfer that BT (one of my least favourite companies) promised. Until the phone is active I can't activate the ADSL..
posted 12:30 ::
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Today I wrote over a dozen letters to notify various organisations of our impending address change. It's a real pain in the bottom, and I'm probably only half way there - I've still got to deal with the utilities yet as the landlord's agent is picky about how we deal with that, and they have not yet sent instructions...
posted 21:58 ::
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Today we visited a house for rent in the village. It's not perfect but it is in the right price range, it is in the village and it is available now. I've dropped my money off with the estate agent and assuming all goes well next week I put down a wad for the deposit and we move in next Saturday.
In the afternoon we had a look at a bungalow in the village. It has decent sized rooms and a passable garden. It has a hip roof so with care it would be possible to fit two smallish bedrooms up there. The rest of the building needs utterly gutting, all the rooms need redeploying and it needs all new plumbing, wiring and a new kitchen and bathroom. It is exactly what we want, the only problem is that the family want £375k for the place, which while theoretically possible is not money we are willing to spend on the place.
I think we will move into our new rental and wait and see what will happen. House prices are falling, the borough is down 10% to December 2007 and a further 6% down to the end of March 2008, by official land registry figures, so if the property has not sold in a month or so we would be tempted to put in an offer in the £200-250k range.
posted 16:28 ::
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Earlier this week I sent an email to a local estate agent, admitidly with a poor local reputation, they never responded so I popped in to see them in person. They sent me an email to arrange a property viewing so I responded by email, today I got home to discover they left a message will waiting for me to confirm. Why do these people put forms and email addresses all over their web site if they don't bother or aren't able to read and reply to email...
posted 18:38 ::
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We asked our landlady what she wanted for the house we rent from her. Today I spoke with her. I had expected her to say £200k, which while wildly overpriced in the current market would be a sensible opening position. Instead she said £225k, which is utter insanity. While it is livable, the house needs a total refurbishment and a significant upgrade to the heating and insulation to make it comfortable in winter.
If you assume a 30-50% price correction[1] over the next 2-3 years, that means I would loose between £67.5-112.5k (excluding mortgage charges) compared with a £20.4-30.6k loss if we continue to rent at the current market rate. Even if we bought at £150k, we'd still loose up to £37.5k on the property, and that's before we spend anything on it to bring it up to a sensible standard.
We will be renting, it's just a case of deciding where and for how much. Once the price correction has taken place we will buy having saved even more by then, two more years of pain for a mortgage free life seems to be worth it.
posted 12:55 ::
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This week we spotted another interesting house. It's a two-bed bungalow, in the village, with a reasonable though not large enough garden. It's internally in need of modernisation and with a loft conversion would be exactly the right size and it's even in a good location. The only problem is that it's valued as a building site - you could fit two 3 or 4 bed houses on the plot, so instead of being on the market at £200-250k it's on the market at £375k - which is too much for my poor bank account.
The only hope is that now the house price correction is in full swing, no horrid little developer is going to pay that much for it and if the price does drop then I'll be off to see my bank then the estate agent...
posted 22:07 ::
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Today we spotted a three-bed bungalow with garden, garage and a proper dining room, kitchen and living room. It's on the market at £265k which is the dead zone above the £250k mark so it won't sell at that price, it will drop to £250k.
On paper it ticks every box, it's seems big enough, it still has a garden, it's not been wrecked by some idiot home improver and it's at a fair price (though it will be worth a lot less in 6-12 months), so there has to be a problem with it. This evening we went round to have a snoop around, the garden isn't as big as advertised (no surprise there) but it's instantly obvious what the problem is, even at 6:30pm the traffic thundering up and down the A34 just 0.5 km away is very noticeable...
posted 20:27 ::
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