Hello! I am Fee, from Vintage Fee, and I have decided to start this blog as a place to keep track of our housing situation without it taking over my main website.
I am somebody who tries to live a positive lifestyle. As a chronic worrier by nature, I've worked hard on changing my mindset and becoming a happier person, and generally a better person to be around. Life does have a habit of getting in the way, though.
So here is my situation. I am 22, and 39 weeks pregnant today. He is a boy and he doesn't have a name. We're hoping to think of one when we meet him, or we're probably going to get into a lot of trouble. Naming a child is far too much responsibility. I live with my partner, Satans Thong, who has joint custody of his almost seven year old daughter, Little Vintage. We are currently waiting for a two bedroom home for the four of us to live in (LV 50% of the time). For the next twelve months, we are homeless.
How did it happen? Well, we didn't have a very good landlord. We moved in together in July 2010, choosing the cheapest place possible because I had left my job to move to England after finishing college and my partner had just been made redundant. We assumed it'd be easy to find work once we were settled in together (so naive!) and that we wouldn't be there for very long. The place didn't even have hot water, but the landlord told us he'd get it fixed. It wasn't a palace, but it was a six month contract, it was cheap and he was willing to accept housing benefit. We had no other choice.
The first winter we spent there, we both got incredibly ill. Neither of us have ever been ill like that before or since. We still didn't have hot water, we were still on benefits so many weeks had to choose between food or gas and the little bits of black mould we had noticed around the doors and windows were beginning to spread. My memories of our first winter in that flat are huddling together under a duvet, feeding eachother antibiotics and trying our best to look after eachother while we were both shivering and coughing a hell of a lot. It was not nice.
We pretty much got better, but the coughing didn't stop (we still have the coughs now, infact!). The mould spread to the point that it was covering entire walls. We had to throw away almost all of our clothes and shoes (and literally all of my handbags!) because they were completely destroyed. We would use harsh chemicals to get rid of it, the chemicals would make our coughs worse, and it'd grow back within the next week. It was a never ending battle. We applied for a grant from the job centre to buy mould resistant paint, but they said no - it was a non-essential. We applied for a different grant because we had no clothes left, but they said no again, obviously. We couldn't afford to keep on top of all of the chemicals we needed to stave off the mould, so we just had to live with it. Our six month contract ran out, our landlord said we could stay on a month to month basis. No new contract was exchanged. We stayed because it was around £100 a month cheaper than even the cheapest private rentals in the worst areas near us, he let us stay because if we complained about anything (not having hot water, mould, door and window frames rotting away...) he'd tell us that if we didn't like it we could get out. He told us that because we didn't have a contract he could tell us to leave there and then, and we'd have nowhere to go. We believed him. He even raised the rent on us, by £20 a month, because he hadn't been paying his mortgage (he "couldn't afford it") so the flat was about to be repossessed. We had nowhere else to go (and by the time of the court case it was August and the mould was tolerable - oh how easy it was to forget how bad it'd get!) so we just agreed. We didn't feel like we had a choice.
I started working part-time and my partner looked in to going to college to fulfil his dream of becoming a primary school teacher. Just as everything was starting to make sense and we looked like we had a way out, life threw us another curve ball. On August 6th 2012 I found out I was 7 weeks pregnant. And we didn't know what to do. I was able to raise my contract to full-time, but money was still tight because my partner was refused a student loan on the grounds that they don't provide them to people doing the course he does. My wage was all that was supporting us, and suddenly I had a baby growing inside of me who needed a safe and healthy home. I went to my local council and explained that I was pregnant, what state my home was in and that I needed help finding alternate housing for the sake of my baby. I was told I was exaggerating, that there were real homeless people with real problems and to go away. Obviously not in quite so many words.
From two months to seven months, between working sometimes around 50 hours a week (and only 39 of them paid because I'm a pushover who covers for everybody and never takes breaks) and battling on through morning sickness and the general aches, pains and illnesses that come with being pregnant, I was in constant contact with the council. I made frequent visits, I emailed them, I called them. I emailed four local MPs and only one of them responded. He was outraged by the situation and forwarded my email to the chief executive of the council. Who responded with something along the lines of "it can't be that bad. I don't see what this girl wants from us. My workers have clearly done their job and yet she still wants more.". There were a hell of a lot of tears.
At seven months pregnant I received an email from a random email address at the council, saying that she had seen my email and that if things were as bad as I was saying they were, to call Private Sector Housing so that an environmental health officer could assess the property. The day the EHO came to visit was a life-changing day for us. As soon as she walked into the flat, she screwed up her nose and said she could smell the mould already - which shouldn't normally be something that makes you happy when someone walks into your house! She assessed that the foundations had flooded, which explained the never-ending mould, the rotted door and window frames (there were even mushrooms growing inside them! Eugh!) and the fact that we had never been able to run a bath because doing so would make the carpets through the flat flood. She couldn't believe that we hadn't had hot water for two and a half years. We hadn't been able to get hold of our landlord for months, and she had six addresses for him - none of them were valid, or matched up to the few we had. He kept changing his address, phone number, email address and even his name. He was impossible to get hold of; every time we got close, he fled back to Nigeria. As far as I know she is still trying to get in touch with him now. However, she decided that it was unrealistic to assume that the work would be carried out before I gave birth and she contacted the council to tell them that the flat was condemned as unsuitable to be lived in by anybody - let alone a pregnant woman and her unborn child. She was outraged we had been allowed to live there for so long. Finally, somebody was listening to me. It felt so good.
And that almost brings us up to date! I'll paste the two relevant blogs I posted to Vintage Fee as new posts on here - things definitely haven't been plain sailing since we moved out, but all I can do is hope that they're moving forward.
If you have any questions or need advice please get in touch (homelessmama90 at gmail dot com). And if you know anything about homelessness - particularly the law that disallows families and pregnant women from living in b&b accommodation for longer than six weeks which is constantly being ignored - please send me any information you have. I don't want my family to be beaten by the system. We matter.
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