Here We Go Again...

**We won't have the internet until Thursday, so I wrote and scheduled this post on Friday, the 3rd.**

We've moved! Again! And as always, it was quite the process. I'll attempt to keep it as short as I can. Funny, huh? Just scroll down till you see pictures if you don't want the whole scoop.

Before we left Los Angeles:
-Brent was assigned a relocation specialist from the Zurich office of Zurich, Beat Kopp (pronounced Bay-ot, not beet, much to my dismay).
-Beat hires, Claire, from Team Relocations to take over.
-Claire has us fill out a survey of what we want in an apartment, how much we want to pay and what areas we would like to live in. What?! How the heck are we supposed to know?
-We fill out the survey to the best of our ability and with our best guess on money figures making sure not to stray more than a few hundred pounds above what Zurich is providing for housing allowance. Where to live, was a different matter seeing as how we've never set foot in the country. We asked for some suggestions and guessed, again.
-Rick, from Dynamic Property Search (hired by Claire), emails Brent to schedule when we'd like to go looking. Beat is paying Claire to pay Rick for 2 days of property search during which he'll show us 10+ properties each time and then aid in getting us settled.

14 March, Day 1 of property search:
-We meet Rick at the tube station in Richmond for our search in Richmond and Kew Gardens.
-He drives us to the first appointment and spends a few minutes explaining the process to us. It goes something like this, landlords and/or owners hire a letting agent (basically a real estate agent) to find a renter for them. Renters (or in our case, Rick) find property listings on the internet and schedule viewings with the agent (in our case, 2-4 agents per day each showing us 2-5 properties each). Renters then decide what they want and tell the agent. Easy enough, right? Wrong! From this point on it becomes much like buying a house. The renters then put in an offer. The listing prices are basic guidelines and NO ONE offers asking price unless they are desperate for the place. The letting agents then puts it to the owner/landlord who then either accepts or counters. So you go back and forth with the agent until you all agree on something. I'm really glad we had Rick because being new to the process and being Americans we probably would have gotten duped BIG TIME if we did this all on our own. Letting agents, and then in turn landlords, are much more willing to bend for relocation agents because they know what they are doing.
-We meet with the agents and see the 13 properties he had scheduled. Some houses, some flats in large converted Victorian mansions and some flats in big fancy developments. We decided we like the quaint houses and conversion flats. We aren't big, fancy development type people. Plus if we're going to be in England, do it right, you know?
-He drops us at the tube stop and we go home and think about what we liked and didn't like and pick our top 3 favorites.

A few pictures of some of the places we saw. Good and bad, I'll let you decide for yourselves...





That week:
-We settle on what we actually want as far as look/feel/price of property
-Email back and forth with Rick about next weekend's search.
-Pick a different area to look in

21 March, Day 2 of property search:
-Rick picks us up at the Chiswick Park tube stop for our property search in Chiswick and Fulham.
-We have a much harder time seeing places due to the traffic (Chiswick & Fulham are closer to the City therefore, there is more going on) and a few agents being late and a few places we were going to pick up the keys for couldn't find the keys.
-We decide Fulham is not really for us and skip 1 or 2 of the places we had on the list.
-Lots of frustration and traffic
-All of the properties Rick shows us are higher than the top end of our budget because he claims he can negotiate lower.
-The one place that was well under our budget was so far away from anything that we would have needed a car.
-We go home and are not in a good mood.
-Brent makes a really comprehensive chart detailing our 3 top properties from each week to compare all the specs of each, including travel times to work and church and pro's and con's of each.
-We decide on 2 properties from week one and email Rick.

More pictures...







23 March, the universe hates us:
-Rick emails and calls to say that our top pick is already under offer and we decide we can't offer any higher but that the second choice will accept our offer.
-Not being able to have our first choice makes us realize we don't want the second choice pick anymore.
-Rick emails to tell us the owner for choice 2 is willing to go £35/month lower because he wants us (we were told we are good applicants because we are young and have a good solid job and were landlords ourselves and plan to stay for 2 years)
-We decide we just don't want choice 2 or anything else lower on the list because everything else doesn't feel right or is too expensive.
-We panic. A lot.
-We ask Claire if we can have one more day of search with Rick because the 2nd day was such a bust and we want to look in Richmond again since we know what we want this time.
-She has to wait for confirmation from Beat that Zurich will pay the £750.

The next few days:
-Still panicking but decide to look online for ourselves.
-We find a few places we like (as much as you can decide from seeing a few pics on the internet).
-We call the letting agent and find it's already under offer but he would be willing to hear other offers because there is an issue with furnished/unfurnished.
-We get word we get another day with Rick. Phew!
-We decide to take a quick trip on our own to Wimbledon to see if we like the area and can find anything that matches what we want. One of Brent's coworkers and his wife live there. They seem like really great people and could totally be friends so we wanted to see where they live.
-The area was nice but the agent wasn't very helpful. Without Rick to liaise for us, the agent just didn't care. He showed us the 5 closest things to the office not even paying attention to what we like.
-Decide Wimbledon is nice but trying to find something we like would be hard.
-Search and find 4 properties we would like Rick to show us on Friday and inform him that we are lowering our budget because with the council tax, we will reach our original estimates of what we want to spend.

27 March, One last try:
-Meet Rick at Richmond station.
-See the 11 properties he found for us (including 3 of the ones we sent him).
-Decide that we could happily live in most of the places we saw.
-Go home very happy and make a chart of our 6 favorites of the day.
-Spend 7 hours making the chart and then subsequently trying to decide what we want.
-Go to bed with a choice in mind.

Even more pictures...









28 March, This is it!:
-Wake up feeling rested and better able to make a confident decision.
-Decide to go with our choice from the night before. It was the only house of the dozens we saw that I got really excited about while viewing. According to Brent, I mentioned that "I love it!" several times as we were walking through it.
-Email Rick and give him the go ahead to call the agent and work his negotiating magic.
-Get word back that we have been chosen and that the owner will take our offer of £100 lower than the asking price.

This week:
-After several emails back and forth with Rick, Claire and Andrew (the letting agent) get the lease and sign and fax it back and schedule the check-in for Saturday.
-Schedule our shipment from LA to be delivered on Saturday!

3 April, The big day: (I'm guessing here seeing as how this hasn't happened yet at the time I'm writing this).
-Rick comes to our Corp. Housing and loads his car up with our quickly expanding amount of belongings.
-We take anything else that wouldn't fit in Rick's car on the train and meet up at the new house.
-Check in, receive our shipment, start unpacking.
-Everything goes wonderfully well and comes off without a hitch. (We hope.)

Our new place:
276 St. Margarets Road
Twickenham, TW1 1PR
UK

We love it and feel very comfortable here. We are a little further away than we had originally planned to be but Brent is willing to sacrifice time to commute. With the negotiation Rick made, we are also spending less than we figured and we kind of feel like we are supposed to be in the ward as well, which always makes a decision feel better.

These are some of the pictures from the online listing. I'm glad they had so many because now I don't have to worry about taking pictures of it until we are done unpacking.

Front and entryway

Double reception room (I LOVE the fireplaces!)


Eat-in kitchen with LOTS of counter space!

more kitchen & water closet (tiny room w/ toilet) under the stairs

Upstairs hallway, study & bathroom

Master bedroom & second bedroom (more fireplaces!)

Patio & yard w/ rose bushes & shed (we have a yard!)

30 Queen Street, Apartment 91, London, EC4R 1BR

Here is our temporary corporate housing. The video pretty much explains everything except for the exterior of the building but the pictures do that.

**Disclaimer** The video is 8 minutes long. Probably only our moms will want to watch the whole thing and that's ok. We won't be offended. In fact, I'm kind of embarrassed by the video but it was more comprehensive than taking a bunch of pictures. That way I could also talk about the quirky little things I want to remember.



Corrections to the video:
-Brent has informed me that the on/off switches for outlets & appliances are for safety since the sockets are 220 volts which is 2x what it is in the US. I still think it is also to help save on power.
-When I say "typical" (about things like the size of appliances and eggs, etc) I mean for modern London, living in the city. Things are a bit larger and more "homey" out where we are moving to.
-The washing machine in the kitchen is *not* actually our favorite thing. That statement was meant to be sarcastic but it was funnier on take one of the video. We find it hilarious and a little awkward to do laundry next to the oven.

Exterior of the building. We lived on the top floor (the 6th floor) towards the back, on the alley side, hence the nice views we had.

Our floor of the building smelled like pizza because of the Domino's downstairs. For some reason, we were always craving pizza...

Front door.

The pedestrian square and the street (Cannon Street). FYI: The greenish building to the right is how close the protesting was to our house on the 1st. Towards the afternoon, there were so many people that they had spread all the way to us. That green building is HSBC, a bank. Not the one we signed up at, actually, we didn't know there was one that close because our HSBC map from the airport didn't cover out that far. Who knew we could have skipped the whole 15 minute walk first thing after we checked in?! Guess we were too tired to be aware of our surroundings. The bright blue building is an Irish Pub. On St. Patrick's Day we could hear drunken singing several time throughout the evening. The rest of the country doesn't do much for St. P's day but the Irish pubs played it up. Anyway, I digress...

As far as corporate housing goes, we could have done much worse so I'm glad that we had this place. It was close to Brent's office and we had fun walking around and getting to know the city. It was also nice to know that we had somewhere to stay when we first got here. It would have been much harder to move half-way across the world had we needed to find somewhere to live on our own, right away. I'm so glad we are moving tomorrow, though. I miss our things and having our own space...

The last of our first days here.

This should be the last post (for awhile) that I document every little detail of the day. For our own journaling purposes, Brent and I want to try to remember as much as we can about those first few days here because they were crazy, fun, exhausting and important. There was so much going on that if we don't write it all down, we'll forget it.

Saturday morning, we decided to have a little more fun and explore with out having the pressure of running errands, well except for going to the grocery store. The general goal for the day was to just take it easy. The jet lag (I know! I mentioned it again!) was really getting to us at this point so we just needed to get out and get some fresh air. I kindly refer to jet lag as "fuzzy brain" because that's how it feels. Like there is a thick cloud of fuzz covering your brain. No clear thoughts, just fuzz.

These little beauties are easily found. This one is across the street from our apartment. Unlike what we'd been told, they aren't just for tourists to take obnoxious pictures in, people actually use them. If red's not your color, they have it in black. And no, we didn't take these pictures as some sort of tribute to Harry Potter. We had no idea about the whole Ministry of Magic thing until people commented on our facebook photo album and I had to google it to figure out what people were talking about. We haven't read Harry Potter, or seen any of the movies other than the first one. I know! Blasphemous, right? *note the sarcasm

We headed out a bit late (11-ish?) so we needed some food. Little did we know that the City is a ghost town on the weekends! Most of the businesses here cater to the business people that buzz around all week. We didn't make that connection. Finally, we saw a McDonalds. It was open. Surprised?

We had passed the London Bridge the day before but wanted to walk across it, so we did. The bridge itself wasn't anything spectacular. The bridge that's there today isn't the famous bridge. That one, well one of them, is in Arizona. The London Bridge has a pretty interesting history, so go look it up on Wikipedia or something. The bridge had some great views. A lot of it, since we were so new to the area, didn't mean anything to us, but we did recognize the Tower Bridge and a few other landmarks. It was a nice little walk.

I think the theme here is "Hey! Let's see how many pictures we can take of the Tower Bridge since it's the only thing we recognize."

After the bridge, we headed towards the grocery store but first came across this monument. It is a monument to the great London fire of 1666. It was built a few years after that. It's now tucked away between some building, hiding for unknowing foreigners to come across on a Saturday afternoon walk. Ok, not really, it actually is one of the prominent attractions in London. It's on a lot of the maps and the tube stop nearby is called Monument. We just didn't know we were so close to it. There are 300+ steps to the top that someday we'll pay the few pounds to climb. We were definitely not up for it that day.

The supermarket, being closer to some tourist spots was open, luckily. That was an interesting experience. Being in the heart of the City, it's small and there isn't a whole lot of variety. We had made a basic list and then just kind of went with what we could find for the rest of it. I had expected the bill to pretty hefty, but it wasn't so bad. Only £50 for several days worth of food. It was fun to see new things or the UK version of things we normally enjoy.

After we got home, we decided to call it a day and that we were just going to stay in for the rest of the night. I did some more nesting and cooking and Brent did some online research to figure out where and how to get to church for the next day.

It may not be a great pic or a fancy meal but I got to cook! It was the first time I had made a meal since the week we moved out of our apartment in LA. It was nice. The kitchen here is very poorly furnished, but I had enough materials to cook a basic meal. Hallelujah! We can finally stop eating out for every meal!

Sunday, we caught the tube and went to Hyde Park/Kensington to go to church. We went to the Hyde Park Ward. It's the main ward in this building, the Stake Centre. Like how I spelled that? The building also houses the London Institute, the Family History Centre, the Employment Resource Centre and the mission office for the London Mission. We'd been told that this was the hub of the church for England. They weren't kidding! It's a big, nice building right down the street from some of the biggest museums in London. It's also just a few minutes tube ride from Buckingham Palace. The building itself was cool. It's just part of a big row of buildings and it has several floors. The foyer is more of a visitors center than lobby. The ward was big too. Lots of Americans. Lots. We felt very comfortable there but also a bit lost. There were so many visitors in Relief Society that they didn't even have us introduce ourselves. They asked if there were any new move ins and then sent out a general "welcome" to any visitors. Wow. Big ward.

The rest of Sunday was spent napping, cooking, talking to family on Skype and getting ready for Brent's first day of work that was coming up in the morning. Doesn't he look snazzy? Don't mind the poor quality of the pic. It was early and I was tired and he was in a hurry. Excuses, excuses. Right?

See? That wasn't so bad! Much shorter than the last post.