"He is happiest, be he king or peasant, who finds peace in his home."
They say that one of the most stressful experiences of your life is moving house. I had always laughed to scorn this, having moved between rented houses with the greatest of ease, even at very short notice.
What “they” should say is that it’s not just the moving, it’s the purchasing of a new house which causes enormous headaches. And we were in a comparatively fortunate position too.
To begin from the beginning…
As you may remember, Boy and I have been living rent-free with his parents for some time now, in order to save up a house deposit. With this arrangement due to come to an end in August, we began looking for a property early this year.
In April, my appointment to a new job in London crystallised our search area to “within reach of the main train line”, and we began looking for a house in earnest in the South Oxfordshire area.
A fortnight into our endeavours, we found a lovely little 2 bedroom end-of-terrace in Goring-on-Thames. Unfortunately, when we went for a viewing (via me trying to take out a gate with a car :s ), it emerged that 17 other people had also been hitting ‘refresh’ on their internet browsers and discovered the same property.
Of those, 3 others decided to put in a bid for the house, so having started below the asking price, we offered slightly over (and all the others offered at the asking price exactly). Despite the fact that we had the highest offer, the seller, advised by the (useless) estate agents, went to a sealed bid process.
Being our first purchase, we were quite nervous about this, but decided to offer the maximum we thought the house was worth. 24 sleepless hours later, we were informed that we had won the bidding process and thus the house! Hurrah!
And that turned out to be the smoothest and least stressful part of the entire process because…
Following having our offer accepted, we went about the usual procedure of getting the mortgage sorted and briefing a solicitor. All the while, the estate agents were ringing to hassle us about what our arrangements were, which we thought was odd but wrote off as one of those things.
The solicitor did his stuff, and the mortgage offer came through as approved, and then we waited. And waited some more.
Eventually, after about 6 weeks, we got a phonecall from the estate agents to ask why we weren’t ready for a completion date 7 days from when they were calling.
This, needless to say, was the first we had heard of such a date. The estate agents then called our solicitors directly to ask them the same question, and they got in touch with us, only for us to have a mutually confused conversation about where this random date had come from. They called the seller’s solicitors, who said they were waiting for a search result and were emphatically not ready to exchange.
An hour or so later, the solicitors at the top of the chain called ours to ask why we were “dragging [our] heels” when everyone else was ready. Imagine both our outrage and that of the solicitor. So we called the seller’s solicitor again, and they confirmed that they still weren’t ready.
In fact, on the Friday, the proposed exchange date, they were saying they weren’t ready until 3pm. And then suddenly it was go-go-go time… We didn’t have time to get the money over to them before close of business, so we did so on Monday. By Tuesday, however, we still hadn’t exchanged as the seller’s solicitors still weren’t ready despite hassling us!
Then miraculously we exchanged and completed all in one go on Wednesday. Most bizarre. This may not sound like it was a total nightmare, but I can assure you that whilst we were going through it, it was hellish.
The estate agents, having been hassle-y all the way through the process, went very quiet, and I had to chase them in order to agree when we could pick up our keys. But we collected them on Saturday and have been in measuring and making plans all weekend! Yay for the new house!
We won’t officially move in for a few weeks yet, as we’re going to do things in stages to help with the financial side of things, but we are now homeowners, with keys, and can go there whenever we like, even at 2 o’clock in the morning. It is very exciting!