House Hunting London Styles

Over the last few weeks, I have been doing something uncharacteristically grown up: house hunting. And so it seems only fair that I rant about it. It's scary and exciting and jaw dropping and eye opening. And you find yourself thinking houses at half a million are cheap (half a freakin' million!) and saying things like: 'This is well priced for the area.' I mean what the fuck do I know about anything, but I feel qualified to comment. You also throw out things like, 'that's at the top of our budget'; 'do we really need five bedrooms?' and 'this has potential.' Potential? What?!

I have actually been enjoying the looking. The looking is great. It's like snooping in people's houses, but you're actually allowed to and the people aren't there, so they can't catch you being a nosy bitch watching through the windows. Oh come on, we all do that right? And of course, most of the ones we were looking at were very nicely done up, or nicely staged, and it becomes very exciting and overwhelming, because you're thinking, where will our stuff go, and can I see myself living here, and if I see another four bed terrace that I like, my head may explode.

There's a certain bubble of giddiness, when you're snooping in, I mean, looking in houses, and you get carried away, which can lead you to become overly excited at interesting storage ideas and scream when you see the kitchen of your dreams. This never happened to me. Honestly. I didn't make the Estate Agent laugh. Not me. No. But when you get home this sort of quiet contemplation takes over, and you find yourselves unable to concentrate on anything, because you're brain is going three million miles a second, just trying to figure stuff out and you start talking yourself out of something. Until you go for a second viewing, and then you talk yourself right back into it. It's complicated. It's a set of emotions most people don't go through very often, unless you're one of those weirdo freaks who change their houses as often as I change my vans (roughly every 18 months to two years because I wear them out). I mean, who does that?

Location, location, location. We are likely moving from an area we know and love, to an area we have no idea about. That is tough. But within that there are still areas that you think, no, I don't want to walk around here at night by myself. And if you're going to be spending ridiculous amounts of money on a house, you want to at least be able to walk home and like your area. It doesn't matter that inside the house is an absolute dream, and so pretty it made me want to cry. (I told you, a lot of emotions.) If you don't really want to walk through the streets to get home, there's a problem.

'It's just at the end of the road.' Just some of the bullshit sprouted by the Estate Agents, though to be fair, I thought there would be more. We went to visit one house and were told the Olympic Park was at the end of the road, so on the way back we decided to walk there. It was about twenty minutes walk away and very much not at the end of the road. You also get a lot of, it's very close to the station, which to be clarified by google maps, usually means twenty minutes walk away. Not so very close.

Size both does and doesn't matter. What I mean by this is that it's not always about the biggest house. The biggest one we've seen we hated. It was not us at all. It was massive but only had one bathroom for it's four bedrooms. We would have had to change so much to get it how we liked it, that it would have been pointless. And it had an extremely creepy, horror film cellar, and I've seen way too many horror films. It was also at the top of our budget and perhaps a little high on price for the area. There I go again with all my knowledge.

The photographs that you see online can really make a difference and we've had cases of being disappointed, relieved and also pleasantly surprised. It seems like it's impossible to get photos right. If you use the fish eye too much, then you often walk in and think it is way smaller than you imagined. But then sometimes things look too narrow or too cluttered, but then you walk in and think, there's so much more space. And when they don't show you a picture of something, but they mention it - for instance, a cellar or basement - that basically means that it's a shit heap that they've done nothing to, but are willing to use as a selling point with the word 'potential' hastily pinned on. Also when they only show the house from the back, that usually means the house looks shitty from the front.

And so we have made an offer on a place and now we have the wait. Why wouldn't they take our offer, we're nice people and we offered the asking price? But then you start doubting everything and the hopes that you weren't getting up, that you did of course get up, are now deflating. I mean, I would literally kill for that kitchen, but if they don't want our offer then it's obviously not meant to be my kitchen, and I'll have to go and snoop in more houses and find the one for us.

This is Rants signing off on the 10th Anniversary of Flat 19, with so much guilt at the possibility of buying a new place and leaving Flat 19, that it's silly. I'm pretty sure Flat 19 won't hold it against me as we've given it ten years of wonder and enchantment, but then, who knows?

To anyone else house hunting,  I feel your pain, excitement, confusion and general WTF?

Rants out.

Remakes

Dear Rants readers, there is a epidemic sweeping through all the big film studios and it needs to be stopped. It's pretty much Disney's fault as they've started with the 'real life' remakes of all the classic animated films - though I hasten to point out that the Jungle Book had one person in it and the rest was CGI (just a different type of animation), and the upcoming Lion King will have zero 'real life' elements as it will all be CGI. Plus it looks exactly the same as the animated one, so what is the effing point? Oh yeah, money. I got it. Money. And whilst I will say I quite enjoyed the Cinderella, mainly because the cast was brilliant and I love Lily James, they are pretty much unnecessary, except for the massive money making. And they don't even have the songs in. Or not all of them anyway. And if they do have the songs in, they're not sung as well as they were because the actors are then chosen for how they look and not what they sound like. Urgh! Not that you can't be extremely attractive and have an amazing voice. You can. But that doesn't mean you'll be cast in the new Disney remake.

But then I read that they are redoing Roald Dahl's The Witches film, and I'm like, no. This cannot happen. This is so unnecessary. This is so wrong. The Witches is brilliantly creepy, capturing the essence of the book perfectly, and we don't need a new one. Besides, Anne Hathaway - no offense intended - She's great but she is no Angelica Houston. Just leave things alone and write some new stuff. Why does everything have to be a remake, a prequel or a sequel?

And then the final straw. They are remaking the best musical ever written! The film that won the most Academy Awards for a Musical, ever! And is fourth on the list of most Academy Award wins, behind Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, Titanic and Ben-Hur. It won 10 Oscars! I mean, really, you want to remake that? Are you stupid? This film does not need a remake. It needs to be treasured for all time as the greatest musical masterpiece and it needs to be left alone. I don't give a flying feckle if Steven Spielberg is directing it, he directed Ready Player One which was shockingly shit considering the wonder of a novel it was crafted from. It makes me angry. Why aren't people creating new shit, instead of trying to recreate or update the classic shit? Just leave it alone.

Needless to say I will not be watching it and I will continue to wear out my West Side Story DVD, and the two or three different versions of the OST that I own. And if it comes back to the stage I will buy a ticket. But I won't subscribe to this remake.

What remakes make you angry? Is there anything you feel was done badly the first time that you would like a remake of? Or do you think it should all be left alone? Comments on a postcard to this address...

Rants out.