Retire from 8 to 5 

If I have learnt from reading innumerable thriller books of varying quality, it is never to give away the ending at the start. However, I value your time as much as I value mine – lets cut the chase short – we did not move. Why? Read on.

In Summer 2024, I wrote the blog post Strategic Relocation: Timing, School Spot, and Property Options. We were convinced moving was the right choice, for family and financial reasons. Following through on this, we had three local real estate agents visit our house in December 2024 and in January 2025, we listed our Birmingham home for sale. Over the next one month, we had 20+ viewings and 0 offers. It was a nuisance to have to clear out the house, clean-up, stage it perfectly and go work from a nearby coffee shop during each viewing. Coincidentally, a very silent market in a good neighborhood suddenly woke up, and over 15 houses in our neighborhood, including four on our street, were listed within the month within 5% price point. This was a blow to us in more ways than one.

When we were house hunting in August 2022, we saw exactly 1 house in this neighborhood within our budget. I am fairly certain the famous Birmingham Council bin strike in Spring 2025 caused our entire neighborhood to flee the local area. Nevertheless, we persisted – we even dropped the house price by 5% from original listing, bringing us back to our purchase price and the total cost of improvements we have made. After 4 months on the market, and recommendation from our real estate agent to further drop the price, we decided to pull out. At this point in our lives, moving to Edinburgh would have been very nice – with family around, it would have been ideal for our child to start school and not have mid-year transitions. However, it was not to be. Given the current economic uncertainty, we don’t want to take an unnecessary 5-10% loss on the sale of our Birmingham house either.

However, we got some very good feedback from our viewings – everyone loved the house on the inside. To be fair, it is very well presented traditional mid-terrace house, clean, no garish painted walls and fully renovated. But everyone hated the outside – we have terribly dirty neighbors on one side, which unfortunately is the shared side of our terraced house. They are a very kind family, who have lived in the same house for the third generation but they don’t seem to care much about house maintenance. It was a messy garden, front and back, when we moved in, but in the last year or so, their house has fallen into shabby and dirty category. At the front of the house is Halloween decoration with red hand prints, that don’t seem to come off even in the incessant British rain, peeling paint and rotten bay window. With the shared entrance, one needs to walk past that to enter our house. Even if you overlook that, you are greeted with a large overgrown garden that also acts as an external storage unit for an old refrigerator, scrap wood, broken wheel barrow, years of toys, a motorbike all tossed into their back garden. Unanimously, all viewers agreed, the neighbor’s garden was a no-go, an eyesore and we would have to clean that up to sell our house.

It is what it is – we will stay in our current house, and deal with the added cost of fixing the neighbor’s house when needed in the future. Until then, I will continue buying indoor plants and drive K crazy by hanging them in the most unsuspected spots in gorgeous macrame plant hangers!

What happened to the other 4 houses on the market – 1 sold for asking price and 3 are still on the market a year later, with offers fallen through on 1 of 3 repeatedly. If anything, this taught us that if we sell in the future, we need to be prepared, mentally and financially, for a very long process.