FLETCH.CX

Oh man I’ve felt unfit recently. Likely because I’ve done absolutely NO exercise for about 4 months, it’s not rocket science is it.

I’m off the booze now till our company ACM at the end of January (NYE camping this Friday and Sat excluded) and I will go climbing, boxing, to the gym and for a run (not rum) at least once a week for the next three months.

Witness the fitness.

Let’s hope that the user tomb242 never deletes their spotify account. Spotify ought to have an archive function really where you can submit libraries like this.

Anyhow, every single Festive Fifty from ‘76 below:

1976, 1977, 1978, 1979, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1982 (all time), 1983, 1984, 1985, 1986, 1987, 1988, 1989, 1990, 1991, 1992, 1992, 1993, 1994, 1995, 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 1999, 2000, 2000 (all time)

It’s world AIDS day today so why not go and make a donation to help raise awareness :-)

China Daily / Reuters.

Arrgh.

That exciting bit of news I was looking forward to telling you is no longer going to happen any time soon wails

Jenno and I were this close to taking ownership of a widebeam narrowboat moored in a dock just off the Thames but alas, the deal has fallen through.

I’m very disappointed. Until two days ago we were going to be on it for Christmas!

Just look at what you could have won:

We were very very close to owning this beast, we’d had our offer accepted, paid our 10% deposit to the broker and had it crewed to a drydock where it was stored for a week, jetwashed and then fully re-surveyed. We’d given notice on our flat and had a clear-out in preparation for the move. Jesus we’d even booked days off in the run up to Christmas to move in. That’s how far along we were.

Unfortunately after our new survey confirmed some suspicions in the previous one that the boat was suffering from the beginnings of an internal corrosion problem it all started to go downhill.

It wasn’t an impossible problem to fix but was something that would need seeing to quite soon and that would entail quite a bit of disruption this summer. The whole of the floor needed to come up to access the internal hull surfaces which is a DIY job for someone like me actually, but a messy one.

Unfortunately we couldn’t come to an agreement with the current owner about how much this work would cost and therefore how much the asking price needed to drop, so the sale began to collapse.

Then, the final nail in the coffin came. I discovered that the sellers boat valuation certificate that we’d based our offer on had been tampered with. They had added £32K onto it!

This isn’t like scanning it in and adding a couple of zeros, you can’t do this by accident it is a serious business. A certificate is styled a bit like a cheque in that the value is written down in words as well as displayed in digits then it’s signed by the qualified surveyor that made the valuation. Altering one is certainly dodgy, probably fraud actually.

The seller admitted doing this but then still wouldn’t drop the price of the boat and so at that point it all went south.

It’s a shame really because we were quite prepared to buy it and do the work, but when the surveyed price dropped by so much it meant that we could no longer get finance for anywhere near the asking price.

Marine finance is a strict business, they will only lend you up to 75% of the value of your vessel, regardless of where it’s moored or what right to the mooring you’ll get when you buy it.

Imagine buying a house where you only own the bricks and mortar, the actual ground it’s on isn’t yours and so doesn’t add any value. The finance you can get on a boat doesn’t alter whether it’s moored in Little Venice or on some stagnent bit of water round the back of a factory.

We knew all of this before we went to buy, but the inflated valuation made us confident that the price we’d offered was achieveable. As it was when the real value came to light, the finance company was forced to drop our offer by £35K, putting it out of reach of the asking price.

The moral of this story is if you’re buying a houseboat, make sure you verify any valuations with the surveyor that signed the cert before you pay for the dry-dock and your own survey. Otherwise your sums might be based on foundations as dodgy as the boat you end up owning.

I’m going to write a proper buyers guide at some point in the near future because all the ones on the web are quite out of date regarding prices and finance.

It has got A LOT harder since the current top google hits on findaproperty etc were written.

I’m off to the kitchen to cry for a little bit (and then start browsing the classifieds again). I suppose the good thing is.. we ARE moving onto a houseboat when we find one :)