"It obviously needs a little work" said Steph. She had the grace to look a little embarrassed as B (style consultant to the stars) and I poked around the grimy interior of the apartment.
Its depressing what £185,000 will buy you in the town where I live. The stairway to the apartment smelt faintly of cabbage and put me in mind of the halls I lived in as a student. Somewhere, a parent was shouting at an unfortunate child.
I sighed. In a single year, I'd tumbled from the lofty heights of a detached four bedroom house with garaging, garden, conservatory and all those good things, to... this. The cash register in my brain ticked away excitedly as I totted up the new kitchen and bathroom that would be needed before I could even consider living in the place. New carpets too. Repainting throughout. And the window frames looked pretty ropey too. I didn't dare open cupboards for fear of discovering dead people, or the sticky results of the vendor's last act of depravity with a duck, or a combination of the two.
I should explain: my landlady has announced that she's going to cash in her chips and sell up. This means that in about a month or so I'll be ejected from my current haven of calm. Therefore I need to find somewhere to live. Somewhere with parking. Somewhere a mere hop skip and a jump from the town.
Poor Steph. Her only success as an estate agent had been to convince me that the place someone else had shown me earlier was the one for me. I walked out of the apartment from hell, back to the newly-built home a few streets away and signed my name away. With luck, I may have enough left over for a small holiday apartment on the French/Spanish border to go with the crippling mortgage payments.
Gotta love impulse house buying.
