So, I moved in yesterday. Spent the whole day packing and unpacking and putting things back together and stuff. Exhausting! But it's all done and I said my goodbyes to my parents and now here I am all alone, in my very first home.

It's scary, but I can get used to this. There's all sorts of weird unfamiliar creeks which I'll have to get used to, and for some reason the whole house sometimes violently shakes and screams whenever the bathroom hot water tap is used. I'm assuming it's air and it'll pass, but I'll get it checked out if it isn't.

I ordered a pizza yesterday to celebrate, and the bloody delivery guy was wandering around looking lost on the other side of the street. I yelled him over and it turns out we're going to have a lot of trouble with nobody knowing where our house is. We're number 11, the house directly next to us is 15, and there's no number 13 (unlucky number etc) which confuses people who are hunting around. Plus, we have a sign for a completely different road outside our house. Not good!

The internet just activated, and it's 3.9 Mbps down. Seems a lot faster than my old one.

So I got the keys to the new place. It's beautiful. I've decided to go with BT for broadband (note: we can only get ADSL, 5~ Mb/s downstream if we're lucky, and it's BT or virgin) and it'll be going into effect on Monday the 8th of August. So there's my move-in date. 8th!

I've taken some pics and put them at my google+ page, if you want to head over yonder.

Exciting times :) Wish me luck!

Good news, two people who read my blog! I got the house :D I'll be signing for the place on the 29th and moving in shortly after, looking forward to it but it's quite scary! My girlfriend will be moving over in the middle of August so I'll have some time alone to get used to. But yay!

In other news, at my current place our internet is absolutely terrible lately. We're with a company called Pipex, who once got bought out by Tiscali, who then got bought out by Carphone Warehouse and got part of Talk-Talk. I think. It's complicated. Anyways, the last 3 weeks our internet connection has decided to randomly disconnect, and can take anywhere from 5 to 40 minutes to reconnect. It's very frustrating.

We did a line test with BT (who own the line), everything checks out. I tested it myself using a phone and it works fine, and I also tried to connect using our other phone line and same issues. So it's absolutely not the phone line.

We called up the ISP a few days ago, and explained the situation. They said "our router isn't supported by them because Belkin (the brand) use their own 'signal channel' to connect to the internet at the exchange which is why it sometimes doesn't work". Yeah, crap technobabble. They didn't acknowledge any faults with the service or such, and just tried to sell us a Talk-Talk branded router instead. We hung up.

Pretending it wasn't the ISP, I decided to buy a new router and see if that works. It's fairly hot here, the router is fairly old and we use it a lot. It could be overheating, right? Well, new router came, set ...

I made an offer on the last property I posted about, now it's just waiting. I have a good feeling though, but we will see!

The agents phoned me up yesterday morning and asked if I was going to make an offer, apparently the landlord was interested and wanted to know. They hadn't done this for any other property I've viewed, so I'm not sure what it means. Either way, I went later that day and everything is good and sent!

We didn't get the last place with the stairs and the pig. Sucks, but someone beat us to it :(

So I arranged for 2 more property viewings. One of them was so new on the market I had to have a small argument with the agents that they did actually have it. "It's on your website" "No it isn't. We don't have it". But they did, and I just got back from viewing the place now.

I had the same agent as the viewing as I did back on the 15th. The guy who wasn't really sure of much. He had no idea of anything of this house and had to call the people up to find out how many bedrooms it has and how much it was etc. To be fair, it was very recent on the market, I guess.

It's a lovely place in a lovely street with lovely neighbours and everything was just lovely. It's furnished, and the furniture is lovely.

The living room is lovely. It's not huge but it's not small either, it's just right. No pig, unfortunately :( It has a lovely view to the garden out front, a big sofa, chairs and a spot for a TV. But we won't be using a TV so that's moot for us.

Upstairs we have just one double bedroom, with a nice big bed and huge walk-in wardrobes. You could fit about half a dozen people in these things. The windows overlook the front garden of the house which is a nice view again, and there's a great big chest of drawers for putting stuff in. Overall awesome for the bedroom.

The bathroom has the usual stuff, shower, bath and looks quite nice. Not ...

Small post, but I just wanted to have this down. After much talkings with my girlfriend, we've decided we're going to make an offer on the last place! Huzzah! Now to figure out how we actually do that. Hmmm.

So, I had another viewing today. Two bedroom house, nice area, even has a mini garden. Yay!

I was 5 minutes late thanks to traffic, but thankfully the agent was nice and didn't care. The house is a rather old building with black and white beams inside, but it's rather lovely.

The living room is fairly spacious and comes complete with a toy pig. The agent said it comes with the house, sounds like a tradition! It directly connects to the kitchen and stairs leading to the 2nd floor (it has a 2nd floor!) and a little hallway on the other side of the house to the downstairs bathroom and the back alleyway.

The kitchen is pretty meh, it's a sink and two cupboards. It has fixtures and a space for a gas cooker, but obviously we'll have to buy it ourselves. It's average sized, I'd say, considering it joins into the living room and such. There's a few more cupboards in between the living room and the kitchen so that makes up for only 2 in the kitchen itself.

The bathroom is big and the utilities inside it are small. We have a small toilet, a small sink and a bath. The bath has a tap-shower attachment, but that's fairly meh.

The alleyway outside is nothing to mention really, but there's a little garden which comes with the house and it's somewhere along the alleyway - we couldn't see it as the agent wasn't told by the landlord which one would be ours.

Going upstairs, you have two big bedrooms with lots of room for nekkid parties and all the things we love. No built in wardrobes or spacing for clothes or anything fancy like that, just 4 ...

So I had a viewing today with the apartment we were supposed to see last week. We talked about it and from what we already saw from outside and such, we decided we'll probably go for this one unless it's too noisy or there's any other big issues from the viewing today.

So I arrive there dead on time, and I get a call; "Sorry, the guy's going to be late, he's very busy today". Okay, fine, at least they told me this time. I waited around and he gets here 5 minutes later, which isn't bad at all. We talk, shake hands, the usual introductory crap and I notice he's looking around like he's lost. I ask him what's wrong, and he admits he has no idea where the apartment is. No problem, it's a confusing area, I'll show him!

We get inside, he closes the door with the keys still in it from outside. Hm. He pulls out a big factsheet for the apartment and takes a minute or two reading it over, and then just puts it down and walks up to the window.

"Well here you have, uh, a laundrettes. You use them to wash your clothes. Obviously. And there's a flippin' fish. Not sure if you're aware, it's a fish and chip shop. Maybe you're into that sort of thing." And he just lists everything he sees from outside. Useful maybe, but I already knew all this. I knew all this from just glancing outside. Maybe he's just getting it out of the way!

"Unfortunately this place hasn't got a driving space, so- oh, sorry, it has two parking spaces. Imagine that, the parking is bigger than the ...

So it's now tuesday, my girlfriend goes back to Poland tomorrow and we won't see each other again until I manage to find us a place.

The apartment viewing on Saturday was cancelled, the current owners of the apartment don't want a couple living there. Yay.

There was a final viewing today at 1, and we decided to go there a little early just in case we wouldn't make it in time (yay taxis!). We arrived at 12:55 and nobody was around, okay, we're early so it's kinda to be expected. But then we waited, and suddenly it was 1:25 and we decided to go yell at the agents.

"Oh, we don't actually have keys to that property, we cancelled the appointment a few days ago. We were supposed to leave you a message!".

So that's that. We've now seen a total of 4 apartments (well, 2 unique) and we've ran out of time. I'm going to try to find a place on my own now, but things might start to get pretty bad soon. :(

From outside, the place looks okay. It's spacious inside and looks fairly fancy. I checked it out with BT and they say I can expect ~17Mbps there. Yay! But, it comes with a down side: It's directly on the corner of an extremely busy road. Not so sure I could survive the noise. Maybe it's quiet inside though, there's no way for us to know without actually going in.

Here's hoping for a miracle home to drop out of the sky. Somewhere quiet.

Just got back from the fourth apartment for today. Taxi was 15 minutes late, and thus we were late, but it's all good the current occupant is very friendly and doesn't mind. Yay!

This one was literally 1 foot away from the entrance to the building. That's both very cool (yay, less walking!) and very not cool (noise!). Building looked like it only had about 6 apartments though, and the girl said it's always very quiet there, so I guess that's fine.

Apartment had one bedroom, which was a very tight fit for a double bed but looks quite nice. I'd probably hit my head waking up every morning though, I'm not too keen on overhead cupboards for beds.

The bathroom was tiny, everything inside it was tiny to make it look bigger. It apparently had a bath and a shower, but I think they wrote bath instead of sink. I didn't see a thing!

Living room and kitchen were kinda merged into one, but I don't know how I'd describe that. They were clearly separated and there was even a wall and everything, but it was just one room. Fun! Kitchen was recently redone and looked really nice, and the living room was cosy but fairly small. We'd probably have to squeeze to fit two computers in there.

Nice neighbourhood, fairly quiet and looks really good, but the apartment is right outside a primary school which could get noisy. Overall, I like it, but we'll hold out for something else.