The first 3 Years and the death of my mother

Given that the main purpose of this blog is to focus on the events at the end of the tenancy I'll only briefly touch on events that took place while we were living in the house.

To begin with this went well. The landlord fixed the pane of glass in the porch door, and even put in off-street parking for us at the front. She did not however fix the broken lock on the patio door or fix the peeling paint on the living room ceiling.

I bought some gardening tools and a lawnmower, and eventually a new garden shed to keep it all in, and tried to fight against the brambles, weeds and ant's nests in the garden.

We re-decorated, and with agreement put up some shelves. The rent got raised from time to time as well.

By late 2006 we had slowly out-grown the house and my partner made it clear she wanted a larger kitchen; the kitchen being very small. However we decided not to move in February 2007 due to the fact that my mother was quite frail and I'd spent a lot of the previous year driving up and down the M6 / M74 to Glasgow. In November 2006 my mother had an accident at home and was taken into hospital. She never returned home. We had her moved to a nursing home that she wanted to move to, near my cousins' home in Glasgow's east end and set about to sell her flat as a means of paying for her care.

My mother died at the nursing home on 11th June 2007. At this point in time we had agreed a sale and I didn't want it to fall through so I arranged for the solicitors to inform the purchasers that I fully intended to honour my mother's agreement.

At this point there was a delay as it turned out that my mother had never taken my father's name off the lease on the flat, indeed the phone bills were still in his name. My father had died in 1988. This meant that there was a delay in sale as we have to go through Probate to prove that as my mother's sole heir and in accordance with her will I was entitled to sell the flat. The flat was subsequently sold and became the main element of my mother's estate. I eventually received the funds from the estate around Christmas 2007.

By then our landlord had notified us that she intended to sell the house and was not going to renew our lease in February. This actually suited us fine as it meant we could look to buy somewhere using the money released from my mother's estate as a deposit and my income to receive a mortgage. I didn't have the funds yet but I knew they were coming.