Flat Out

Whether it's true or not, there's a commonly held view that among the top five most stressful things in life are changing jobs, changing house, and divorce. Fortunately, my job isn't in jeopardy! But sadly, I have to find another flat! My landlord's new-millennium property mania is wreaking serious financial havoc, and she has to off-load my flat. It's presently under offer, and can be expected to settle in the next four to eight weeks, but maybe longer. In England, property settlement can occur within a week of the actual handover. And there are no guarantees that the sale will go through until the contracts are exchanged, very late in the process. The real problem arises when there is a chain of sales. Person A is selling to Person B who will only buy if they can sell their existing property to Person C, and so on and so on. If there are five parties in this chain of sale, just one of them can encounter difficulties and pull the pin on everyone else. So you can spend weeks or months waiting for a sale to go through, only to have it fall apart on the actual date of settlement. At first, I wasn't too worried about the impending sale, because of the possibility of a chain and months of delay. Unfortunately, the prospective purchaser is an investor! Now I just want to move and re-settle as soon as possible.

With my day off work today, I took the opportunity to look at two flats. The first is in the Seven Dials district of Covent Garden. It's a first floor studio, in need of refurbishment, in a c.1835 building that has a hardware store on the ground floor. The flat is clean, but old, and the asking price of £195/week is reasonable (it scares me that I actually believe that). But the property is just a touch too old to make me happy. For £195/week, I'd like to live somewhere that doesn't have sticky old lino in the kitchen and bathroom, and I prefer to have heating in a spacious, drafty kitchen.

The second flat is in the beautiful art deco complex of Florin Court, which faces on to Charterhouse Square. The building piqued my set-jetting sensibility, as I knew it to be the fictional home of Hercule Poirot in the Poirot television series. There is a basement pool, and sauna, and a beautiful 10th floor rooftop garden with stunning 270° views of the City, St Paul's, the London Eye, the West End, and so on. The only problem is the shoebox apartment. All the studios in this building are embarrassingly small. The futon-style sofa-bed almost completely fills the room, and the less said about the broom-closet kitchen and bathroom, the better. Let's just say that the Poirot producers employ considerable dramatic license.