Moving Nightmares

I think we are moving this weekend, I think, but I'm not so sure.
A removal company has been booked for Monday, and the cleaners come in on Wednesday to 'ensure' we get our deposit back.
We put in an offer for our 'new' rental house last month and yesterday we were supposed to sign the contracts, but the contracts hadn't been returned from the owner. We came to inspect the house anyway to make sure the items had been fixed that we had requested and to check if the house had been cleaned. Well, the gashob still had no knobs on it and the fridge stank of the milk and mandarins gone very bad.....there was a big bottle of bleach on the windowsill, but no further indication of cleaning activities. This, while the owner had promised that the work would have been done.
So, I'm not so sure the house will be ready by tomorrow, and we are not signing a contract before it will......still, the move is all planned for next week.

An inspection by an independent company had not been arranged for either, and we not plan to pay for a deposit without an itemized report. This, because when we move out, the owners might claim that the items broken are due to our fault and refuse to pay the deposit back. When moving out of Amersham we learned how anal those inspections are. When during move-in the inspector forgets to note a fault that's there, the tenant will have to pay for it later.
House inspections are a serieus thing in Britain. One inspector warned us, some landlords will on purpuse hang white curtains etc. and upon finding stains during moving out they will hold the deposit and use it for redecorating their home. Nasty business in my opinion.
It looks like renters are still treated as a lower class citizens, no matter how much rent they pay.

I'm wondering if we are just very unlucky or if we just make the wrong decisions consistently, I'm starting to doubt myself. When we moved from the USA to a rental in Amersham, the owner decided to come back and live in the house, after only 6 months. Now we have lived in the current house for just a year, and we heard through word of mouth that the owner of this house is planning to sell the place. So we start looking, and here we are.....lease is ending whitin 2 weeks time, and the new landlord sounds not very promising.

This is going to be our 8th place to live in our 12.5 years of marriage, not counting the temporary arrangements, and it's certainly not going to be our last.

Well, I'll start packing and hopefully we are going to obtain the keys this weekend.

~sigh~