26 July 2011
Dear Sarah Beeny,
Steve and I have been watching your house programme over the last few weeks and really enjoy it. There’s something incredibly satisfying about seeing other people’s misfortunes, particularly when they’ve been stupid enough to buy a house with dry rot/subsidence/mice/damp/termites, am I right? Serves them right. Which brings me to the main reason for my letter; we’re first time buyers and the house we’re buying is super lovely. There are just a few tiny issues with it that we were hoping you could put our minds at ease about.
The first is that it’s on a tilt. Not a huge one. But if you sit in a spinny chair in any of the rooms you’ll roll into the wall – it’s sort of fun. The other thing is that the estate agent said there was an indoor pool, which there sort of is, in the basement, but it’s more of a massive, 2 foot deep puddle. It smells a bit of poo too.
We had a second viewing and noticed a few cracks in the walls, but they weren’t massive, and anyway, as Steve says, his bum must be broken because there’s a huge crack down that too! So we’re not too worried. The vendors mentioned that when there’s a full moon sometimes the walls drip blood and crockery flies across the room, but that’s only once a month so I think we’ll be able to cope.
The last issue is that one of the walk in wardrobes appears to have some kind of vortex in it so that if you open the door you get sucked into oblivion, but we can get a flat pack IKEA one for under a ton.
So what are your thoughts? Other than the teething problems above, it really is our dream home and we can’t wait to move in. You’d be welcome to come and see it once we’ve given it a lick of paint. What I think would make it even more homely though would be a signed photo of you, Sarah, the patron saint of property owners. I’d frame it and put it up in the hall, and it might even serve to partially cover up one of the cracks…
Yours sincerely,
Lucy Knight
