In Which We Get Diverted By The Need For An Annexe

By the end of Summer 2020, things were falling into place. We had been country dwellers for the best part of three months, living in a rural cottage opposite a stables (sadly empty as the residents had been evicted for leaping over the fence and causing havoc in the road) and felt enthused by country life; our criteria for choosing our dream house had been tightened up by my mother coming on board (needing to live somewhere where a family member could be right next door in case of emergency - so we were looking for House With Annexe); and… No, we hadn’t sold our London flat; that was the missing link.  It had now been on the market for seven months.

Mum gets ready to blend in with the locals

We continued to drool over the Dream House I told you about last time - which did have an annexe, a rather nice two floor one. The agents would ring us every so often to say it was still available and what was our position? Hopeless, we replied. We trekked back to London at the end of our three month idyll. We saw our flat with new eyes, heavily influenced by the consistent feedback from prospective buyers. It was an ugly, dark, unwelcoming thing. And it was on the second floor! What were we thinking? 

Still prospective buyers came trudging through, and the feedback remained somewhere between depressing and outrageous. “They said they loved the flat, but they really wanted a house.” “They said they loved the flat, but they really want to live in Carshalton.” “They said they loved the flat, they’ve got another 15 properties to look at and they’re planning to make a decision sometime in 2028.”

We had been rather silly, I suppose, to expect that Estate Agents might vet buyers to check they actually wanted to buy a second floor flat, before asking us to tidy and disinfect ready for another round of disappointment. Their approach seemed to be of the “throw enough dung at the wall and some of it will stick” variety. I suppose if I were on commission I too might be tempted to hoosh everyone on my client list through the door because You Never Know.

And of course you know what’s coming next. Our Dream House #2 was bought by someone else.

But I had caught the You Never Know bug when it came to deciding whether to keep looking at prospective houses. Obviously, having lost two dream homes, we would be crazy to find another before we’d sold the flat. But, like a relapsing addict, I reached for RightMove. I logicked aside Helen’s entreaties. You Never Know, I said, we might get a buyer next week, it would be good to have a shortlist of properties ready to view. Helen, who had come to the view that we would still be in this flat at the age of 94, still with prospective buyers saying they were actually after a 15 bed mansion in the Algarve, left me to it.

It was interesting using “must have annexe” as a criterion. There was no shortage of annexes, but they came in a variety of forms. You had the glorified summerhouse at the far end of a three acre plot, from where presumably my mum would have to summon aid by semaphore (“What’s she saying? Kelp? She needs kelp?”). You had the converted garage turned into a tiny concrete cell more suitable for novice nuns. You had what agents call the “potential annexe”, viz. a tumbledown woodstore with “redevelopment and income opportunity (subject to consent)”.

I assembled a shortlist of six properties. Gradually they came under offer and disappeared. Potential flat buyers came and went. It was now ten months since we’d put our flat on the market. We had dropped our price twice. Short of offering a free dinner service with every purchase, we didn’t see what we could do. I had three shortlisted properties left.

But, as they say in clickbait land, what happened next will astonish you.