MISFORTUNE IN THE 1980s
9148 Ashford 1 - Ashford House
The setting up our Computerland franchise in Feltham unfortunately demanded a move from Basingstoke. Moreover, I no longer had the IBM Guarantee. Accordingly it took us an inordinate length of time to sell the house. Moving house has always been a fraught time; having to keep the house clean and then even cleaner when people are expected. The worst irritations are the potential buyers who play games with you. In particular, there are those who really have no intention of buying a house, but just want to see it. I well remember one couple as they were leaving being effusive in their thanks and finishing up with the statement "...thank you so much. I've learned so much from coming round the house and will make all sorts of changes to my own house as a result" ; after we had cleaned the house from top to bottom for them!
Even worse were those who promised to buy and then didn't. We had one from overseas who dragged it out for three months before we gave up; and put the house back on the market. I don't know what he intended, but after the first visit when he made the offer we heard nothing more from him -- and it cost us a lot of money in the delay.
Anyway, we
eventually managed to sell the house. In the
meantime we lost a very nice house in Ashford. This was Ashford in Middlesex,
incidentally, because that was the nearest location to our ComputerLand.
Our Victorian cottage in Ashford!
We did eventually manage to buy a very small Victorian cottage. We believe it was Victorian because it was dated 1901, the very year Victoria died. It was the sort of thing lots of people want, but it was not my favourite. It was always very damp and the roof leaked.
The
rear garden
It had a tiny front garden and an almost as small a rear garden -- which I laid to roses and paving.
Downstairs it had
the narrowest hall possible. This caused major problems, because the biggest
settee simply couldn't be fitted through, and we had to give it to Sarah. When
we moved to Milton Keynes we had to buy it back from
Sarah, for
something like £500!
On the ground floor, at the front, it had a small reception room which was just about filled with the rest of our suite. At the back it had a very dark dining room, off which was the kitchen. This was also minute; but it had everything we needed. Like most of these cottages which have been modernised, the bathroom was downstairs. As it was part of the modernisation it was actually quite the nice, but was somewhat away from the bedroom and the only one loo in the whole house was in it. The nicest feature was that there was a sort of conservatory leading to the bathroom, which had brick walls but a transparent roof.
Halfway up the stairs was the second bedroom which was quite small, but we actually used it as the main bedroom. All the way up stairs was the main bedroom, which was the largest room in the house. I used this as my office. The third bedroom was a reasonable size and that was used by Sarah. She insisted I put new shelves in, and then immediately left to set up on her own. There was also a loft which was nicely fitted out with cabinets and worktops, but I only ever used it to store things.
At the back there was a very large garage, albeit with a plastic roof and it was really rather ramshackle. We could get two cars into this. On the other hand, it required a lot of reversing to do this even though it had had a very large door. There was no outside parking, so I had to get the car into it every night. It obviously been used as a workshop at some time in the past, since it had an inspection pit.
All in all, it was what would have been described as charming Victorian cottage -- even despite the main road thundering past the front. But I never liked it and was glad to get away from it.
Incidentally, while we were waiting for this house we had rented a two bedroom holiday home on the Thames, by the bridge over to Walton. It would have been very nice in the summer, since the large gardens ran down to the Thames. In the depths of winter, though, it was incredibly cold. It was so cold that in the worst two weeks we actually slept at Computerland itself.
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