Craig has worked really hard again this week, and the back garden is now complete, nice and tidy, with some bark to neaten up by the white terrace wall. Would have taken a photo, but the rain wouldn't have done it justice!!

So, without complete, all that is left is the small matter of the front garden. Craig began by digging out a massive tree stump, and then has systematically begun removing soil and turf from the area for parking. Today, once the rain stopped, we were back there digging out more. Craig is killing himself wheeling the barrow up a home made ramp to the skip!!!Quite a funny sight though!

While clearing the weeds from between the paving slabs that make up the path, we discovered one slab with a big hole underneath it! Craig nearly fell in! Worked out it was probably because of the roots from the tree stump Craig had removed! it was quite large, but least if was an easy place to dump some of the soil rather than getting another barrow load into the skip!!

Please Miss, can I take your photo??!!

Grand Designs Show live
We had a fantastic day out yesterday at the Grand Designs Live show in London, an dCraig was over the moon to meet his heroine....Ms Beeny herself!!! We didn't ahve chance to discuss the ins and outs, ups and downs of property development with her, but it was fab to meet her! We did sit in on her seminar where she spoke to 2 developers from Property Ladder, and it was quite cool to feel like we knew where they were coming from with things, having been there ourselves. Would they do it again???Jury still out!

Oh to be an Estate Agent!

Well, they came. 2 Estate Agents. Chamberlains were first.....he was OK, and said he really liked the place (we expected nothing less), but he used so many cliches, and little terms, and thought he was really funny..............he wasn't!!! However, he did say the standard of the interior would rival a semi in the area, which was a definite positive. he told us off road parking could add £5k to the property. Then came a girl from Dixons. She has supposedly won awards for her work...not sure what they were!! She kept referring to the house as ex-council and as such, the perceptions of buyers would be that it isn't a nice area and therefore we wouldn't get as much as the same house in another area. We were confused. We didn't know it was ex-council, and it certainly isn't in an area you'd think was ex-council if you saw it. She told us she'd help us find a better house in the future with more potential......we'd hit a ceiling price very quickly, as it's ex-council....blah, blah blah!! She also told us off road parking would make no difference to sale price. Hmmmmm.

When she'd gone, we talked about it more and we agreed we thought it had been owned privately since being built. We spoke to the neighbours and they agreed. A local guy named Matthews had owned 12 of the houses in the row, since 1944 (from Birmingham and Midland Estates who built them in 1937) I looked up the deeds when we got home to check. So this has obviously blown our confidence in Dixons amazing staff! Blooming cheek telling us we'd made a mistake buying the house and making such an effort with it!!!

Anyway, the upshot is that both agents gave similar valuations, slightly under what we would like to get, but not far off, so we were quite happy. (However, would not being ex-council mean a £5k increase in value??!!)

Tonight we've shown a family round. The parents are looking to buy a pad for their kids. The daughter came with them, but the 30 year old son is too lazy to look!! However, the Dad scrutinised the place and 'interviewed' Craig in detail about the work he'd done etc. On leaving he said he'd let the kids have his house and he'd move in there!! They are going to get the lad round before they move forward, but still positive. Girl really likes it, so lets hope she works on her Dad!

So, just the back garden to finish sorting. Need to get up the rest of the ugly paving slabs to unearth the rest of the crazy paving below, and clean that up. The front garden will be dictated by the response of viewers really.

In an ideal world, we'd love someone to say, knock a couple of thousand off the asking price, and they'll do the driveway themselves........maybe we're just being lazy!!!

The Day of reckoning looms!

Yes I know, we hoped to have valuations last week, but the rain held up play on the decking!!! Craig also suffered a dose of man flu so wasn't as fit as he'd like to have been!

However, the decking is now done, except for the steps which Craig is going to build today. I am going to call the estate agents this morning (while Craig is stretching a nice canvas picture of a flower for the kitchen wall!) and arrange for valuations tomorrow. Then we will call the people who have shown an interest and get them to see the finished article! Fingers crossed.

Got the week off work, so we can carry on tidying the back garden (where we have found some borders and crazy paving...looks a lot better than slabs, so we're going to pull up the slabs and see how far the paving goes!). We then need to tackle the front, but all being well, we'll do that while under offer. We can only hope!!