House hunting in London…. aaarghhh!!!!

5th November 2014

By Zoe Parker

The big move to London is getting closer and closer, and after a very stressful and hectic few days down in London me, Jamie and George have finally found somewhere to live!

If you’ve ever searched for somewhere to live in London then you’ll know exactly what I mean, it’s so hard!!! And it’s even harder if you’re trying to find a house in London whilst living in Loughborough!! Each day we would search through rightmove and make a list of the houses or flats which we liked the look of, we would then ring up to try and book a viewing only to be told ‘sorry that property has already gone’ Some of them had only been added onto the site 5 minutes ago, how could they already be gone!?

We decided that we just needed to go down to London, book as many appointments as we could the night before, and then keep our fingers crossed that by the time we got to London the next morning they would still be available. That was easier said than done… I managed to book 5 viewings on the Thursday afternoon, and headed down to London early on the Friday, by the time I arrived at St. Pancras 4 out of 5 of my viewings had been cancelled! Thankfully the one house I did get to see was a lovely terrace in Camden, it was great and I’d learnt by now that you can’t hang around with these things so I told the estate agent we’d have it! He then told me he’d just need to speak with the landlord and then we could start completing all the needed paperwork. I knew this was too good to be true, surely it couldn’t be that easy!?… It wasn’t… I got a call the next day saying we didn’t get the house as they’d received a better offer, so so so annoying!

George and I decided to head down to London to try again, and surprise surprise after another long day of traipsing all over London we had absolutely no luck! We found ourselves in the middle of a bidding war, which was completely unfair and super frustrating. I guess we didn’t win the war as we never did hear back from that estate agent…

We thought it had to be third time lucky, so this time Jamie and I went down, it wasn’t looking good though as we hadn’t managed to book any viewings. We spent the whole morning ringing every estate agent in London and still there was nothing. At last I had a call telling me about a property that had just come on the market, so of course we said ‘yes yes yes’ to viewing it. The house was just right for us; 3 double bedrooms, a lovely bathroom, kitchen and lounge and a cute little back garden. It’s in Stratford right near the Olympic stadium and a short tube or bus ride to get to our new shop in Clerkenwell.

After hours of searching online, days walking all over London, endless phone calls and lots and lots of let-downs we have finally found somewhere to live! Now we are all really excited about our move to London and hope to see lots of you at our new Clerkenwell showroom.

I thought you might like to see a quick photo of Jamie looking very happy outside our new house….

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