Barb and everyone, thank you for your good wishes.
When you agree to sell a house here, you make a binding contract (in England called "exchanging" and in Scotland "concluding the missives") - part of that contract is agreeing on a completion date (in Scotland, an "entry date") - on that date, you have to be out and your purchasers must pay the money, in return for which they get the keys. You can agree to buy your new house on the same day (subject to the sellers' co-operation of course), or you might agree to buy it later - if you do that, you end up having to put your furniture into store and maybe having to lease a flat or something to live in. Two of my friends have recently moved long distances - one to the south of England and one to Milan, Italy - they both decided to rent for a year before making a decision about buying. This gives you more flexibility, in that you can get used to the area, decide exactly where you want to live, etc, but of course it also costs you money. My friend who moved within the UK was lucky in that her husband's company was paying a relocation grant, but otherwise it is not cheap to rent, or to store furniture.
We haven't bought in Edinburgh yet, but I hope we will be able to get the keys to whatever we buy on the same day, or the day after, we move out of here. In order to make things easier for my younger daughter, I think she and I will stay up here until the Easter holiday - I am very fortunate in that I have a friend with a basement flat in her house that is currently unoccupied, so we will be able to stay in that (to rent commercially is not only prohibitively expensive, but also means a minimum 6 months' lease, which would not be much use for us) - but my husband will then be able to move into the new property, so that we are no longer paying the rent on the flat he currently has in Edinburgh. It's a wonderful flat right in the New Town (which isn't at all New), and we have all enjoyed having it, but it costs a fortune.
Anyway, that's the plan, and we all know what happens to the best-laid ones of those...
I qualified in law in England, and when I came to Scotland I had to requalify in Scots Law. Some things are more or less the same, but conveyancing is markedly different - however, I haven't done any since I took the exams, so I have no hands-on experience of it up here. When I went to the Law Society of Scotland in Edinburgh to sit my exams, I met a girl from America who had qualified there, then met her English husband and moved to England - requalified there - then he had got a job in Scotland and she was requalifying again. In between that she had had what was still a young baby. i don't know how she did it - I didn't study for the Scots law exams until my youngest child was in primary school, and that was bad enough!
despite being a (reluctant) lawyer, I am far more interested in the size of the kitchen, etc than all the paperwork - in fact I have a complete aversion to it when not in the office, and leave all the official letters unopened for my husband to deal with (I hate to admit this - but it's not that I can't understand all that stuff, i just don't want to have to think about it). I think it's interesting how your requirements in a house change over the years - I have become much more demanding than I used to be, and am very definite about the kitchen in particular, also the bathrooms and the views from the windows.
Wouldn't it be wonderful to have a house like the Ladies of Covington one? Sadly in Edinburgh that will never be, though there are compensations!
Rosemary
