Bay city rollers.

Trying to be organised this morning (well, afternoon now...) and sort through paperwork. Clean a bit. Put some hooks and pictures up maybe. But it's much better to sit in the bay window with a cup of tea and watch the world go by...

That's the one reason why I wanted to rent this flat. The bay window seat. Ok, and the red carpets.

When we first rang up about the flat we were told it had been rented out already. Gutted! So we looked at some crappy typical English narrow houses with plenty of rooms which were all tiny, with ridiculously narrow and steep staircases separating the 2 or 3 floor. Houses where the front door is right on the pavement (see how British I'm becoming - I always say sidewalk usually...). We did see some nice ones too but mostly ones that did not seem like a home at all. I know, where we lived the first 2 years after moving to York was massive so maybe I'm a bit spoilt. I don't mind small though, as long as it's cosy. And most of the houses we saw were decidedly not cosy.

Anyway.

After looking for a month or two, this flat came back up on the website. So we rang up. And got a viewing (woop!). We went around and the lady showing us around didn't have answers for most of our questions (no surprises there). She did tell us that the house hadn't been rented out last time we'd rung up, but that the landlord had taken it off the market to do it up a bit. We also got to meet the landlord who lives next door and he was lovely. The visit dragged on a bit and the estate agent was getting twitchy. Clearly this didn't fit in her 10-minute-per-house view of the world.

We decided to go around again and try to view the house one more time before making our final decision, and the landlord was very happy to show us around. He told us that the house *had* been taken off the market because someone had wanted to rent it, but after a month or so of umming and arring they'd not been able to set a move in date. So it went back on the market.

Another flat we looked at, had been advertised as having a yard and being unfurnished. We got there and the 'yard' was the space where everyone in the surrounding flats (this was ground floor) walked to get to their own front doors. Someone in a neighbouring flat had a sofa sat just outside their door - just like in one of those movies set in the ghetto... I'd imagine this sofa was quite saturated by this point! We got in the flat and it was packed with people viewing it. And filled with furniture. And a couple of people moving boxes out. Turns out it was a furnished flat (the estate agent got quite hostile when we asked her about it...) and that this was, in fact, moving day for the current tenants. Poor people, trying to move all their stuff out when 15 odd people were walking around in their house...

Anyway. I got my bay window and red carpets and jag sitter hellre har, och luktar pa blommorna...