Back in July last year we started looking for our first home. We were renting a new build, three bed part furnished house, so I had high expectations of what I wanted. You can see some photos of what our rented house was like here. Sometimes you don’t know what you want until you start searching for houses!
House number 1
Rightmove became my new best friend and I thought I’d found a perfect house just up the road from us, it was a three-storey, three bedroom house and was lovely. It was similar to our rented house, as it was built by the same company, and on the same estate. Not much would have to change.
Unfortunately, after going through valuations, searches, solicitors, mortgage advisors, the sale of the house fell through due to the sellers dragging their feet. Talk about anticlimax. The hunt for a different house was on. This time it was more stressful as we’d received notice from our landlord and we had two months to move out. How do you buy a house in two months?!
House number 2
Once again, after hundreds of searches, we found a house on the other side of the estate that was older but had just had a total refurbishment, it had a brand new kitchen and bathroom and was cream throughout, so you could live in it but decorate as you go. We thought it was perfect, we put an offer in and it was accepted.
We started to get things ready, the house was empty and we could move pretty quickly. I got excited, I shouldn’t have.
I got a call at work to say that the house had been under valued by £9,000. The bank would not give us a mortgage for what we had offered because it wasn’t worth it, for them, or for us. After some nasty exchanges with the seller we pulled out of the sale. We were not willing to pay over the odds for a house.
With just over 6 weeks until we had to be out of our rented house, we had to make a decision on whether we looked for another house to buy or whether it made sense to rent for another six months.
House number 3
That’s when we found our current house. It was bigger than the others, the other side of town, closer to Alfie’s childminder and work, but needed more work doing to it. Was it worth it?
It was not decorated how we wanted. But, it had lots of potential, we just had to see past the previous owner’s furniture and decoration and imagine what you could do with it and the world is your oyster!
Mummy Fox xx