I moved into my first home last week. For anyone in a position to do this and is thinking about it, DO IT – it’s one of the best feelings ever. But my goodness, be prepared. Be prepared for the stress, the disappointment, the agony, the waiting, the excitement, and the overall mental and emotional exhaustion. I have a newfound understanding and empathy of everyone who ever said before that buying a house was one of the most stressful things you can do. Having previously brushed it off as being ‘not that bad, surely?!’, I most definitely get it now.
Our house-buying story began 17 months ago when we put my partner’s house on the market. With excitement tingling in our fingertips we gave the place a lick of paint and plugged in the air fresheners, ready to welcome potential buyers into our home. It was fun speaking to people and showing them round, and within just a few weeks, we’d sold to someone who would later become our future nemesis. (Nb. This is an exaggerated term for dramatic effect. I’m sure he’s a fine person, but he will forever be known by us as the destroyer of dreams).
Months went by (yes, months), and eventually, we came to a point when we were ready to decide upon a move-in date. But oh no, that would be too simple, wouldn’t it? Four months later, after realising that an old house may actually come with a little bit of work to do here and there, Nemesis pulled out of the sale. Four months of our lives waiting, essentially wasted.
This brought us to January 2020. I’m not sure I’ve ever been so angry, but there isn’t much you can do when someone says they don’t want to spend their lives paying off a debt on your house. It’s not something you can enforce and rarely persuade. Back on the market we went, and at this point, murmurings of coronavirus were seeping their way into homes across the UK. I gave the handles a wipe after viewings. Anyway, once again we sold, and for much more than Nemesis paid, so as you can imagine, we were absolutely thrilled. Sale number two began it’s proceedings as corona began its destruction, yet a couple of weeks down the line, we were met with another blow. Out the buyers had pulled. Unfortunately, as with many people at this time, one of the buyers had lost their job. Worse for them than it was for us in this particular situation, and we hadn’t lost much time, so back on the market we went!
The third (and final, you’ll be pleased to hear) sale went to a very lovely lady and her little girl, and we were very happy with the result. Not least because the novelty of showing people around the house wore off after approximately two hours. There are only so many times you can say ‘well as you can see, this is the living room’, and give yourself a legitimate chuckle at your hilarious wit. Anyway, we were finally on our way, and just in the nick of time as the housing market closed down to make way for corona.
The months of lockdown one trickled by, and eventually the market opened back up, and it opened with a bang. It wasn’t long before we found a house we loved, and that was all well and good, until we found out that there were 52 other interested parties. Now, if any of you have ever done best and final before, you will feel my pain, but that is one of the most stressful things I’ve ever experienced in itself! You want to win the bid but don’t want to pay any more than just above the next highest person. Thereabouts impossible to predict, and thus, ridiculous bidding ensues. After umming and ahhing, we ended up putting in our absolute highest offer, thinking that if it goes above that, then we never could have afforded it in the first place. Now, I don’t mind telling you that our offer was ridiculous (almost twenty grand above the highest end of the guide price), and still, we didn’t get it. Another offer was ‘significantly higher’. And so, we learned that this was what we were dealing with.
Looking for semi-detached houses with three bedrooms, a hallway, a decent garden, and a driveway was hard enough in itself, but throw in the fact that even the ones that you can afford, you won’t be able to afford in the end, is a riddle that’s very difficult to figure out. Do you lower your budget in the hopes that you’ll then be able to gazump someone else? Is that actually what it’s all about; who wants the house enough that they’ll pay over and above what any other reasonable offer would be? And most importantly, how on earth do you compete with that?! Luckily, we’d later find out.
So, we didn’t get the ‘dream’ house, but I can tell you now that I’m over the moon that we didn’t. It’s funny how that works out. A few weeks before we had our offer accepted we actually got a call saying that the sale had fallen through (again, four months later), for no apparent major reason, and do we still want it? I like to think that this shows that gazumping isn’t always the best way to go. Nor is it always the best offer to accept as a vendor. I’ll definitely be bearing this in mind in the future, as this little nugget of wisdom worked in our favour for the house we eventually bought.
We moved out at the end of June, having decided to live with family until we found somewhere to put us in a better buying position, and the frustration set in. We’d sold up, there was nothing holding us back and still we couldn’t settle on a house. However, our perspective had changed, and we were living somewhere new. Our eyes were opened to a previously unexplored area of Sheffield, and boy, were we glad they were. So, the search changed, ten months after we started looking within a very specific area. I often wonder if we’d feel as happy with our house as we do now, if we had had an offer accepted on a house back in the early days of searching, and ultimately, the answer is probably not. Again, another eye-opening experience in the world of house buying. I was all up for buying the first house we saw (genuinely), but DO NOT EVER, EVER do this when you’re buying your first home, because in reality, you’ve no idea what you want at this point.
Months of searching and house viewing went by; homes being rejected because of a little window, an overlooked garden, or even simply because we didn’t get ‘the feeling’. These reasons sound petty, but they were the biggest dealbreakers at the time, and I’ve learnt that those little niggley things are actually big alarm bells. It’s a lot of money to spend on something, so you absolutely have to be sure, and if you’re not, it’s not right. I had a nasty habit of convincing myself that each house would be the house before we’d even seen it. I would not recommend this, because when you stew on what you saw and you feel that niggle, it’s even harder to admit to yourself that it wasn’t the one.
Three months after moving out, we FINALLY found the house, and by some miracle, there weren’t 52 viewings booked in. I’d like to point out, that after looking for a three bed, semi-detached house with a driveway in Walkley, this new dream house was a four bed, end terrace sporting very little on-street parking on the edge of Nether Edge, and this is why you have to get out there and kiss a lot of frog-houses in order to find your prince-pad. We made our lovely little offer and waited. Somehow there ended up being only two offers in, and not to brag, but apparently the vendors preferred us. I’m sure this was down to our great personalities and charming nature, and absolutely nothing to do with the fact that we were chain-free. We were in a good position, and it looked like there was a chance that we might actually get this house. Skepticism was rife here because of all the bad luck we’d had, and, as suspected, it didn’t want to leave us alone quite yet. The other interested party were annoyed because we were given the first opportunity to up our offer, and we took it. They were angry and they reacted. BAM, gazumped. They offered something ridiculous, that we felt the house just wasn’t worth, even though we absolutely loved it. However, the bad luck that followed us around got bored at this point and our chain-free charm seemed to be working. The vendors agreed to accept our offer if we upped it just a teeny bit more. So we did. This offer was nowhere near the gazumper’s offer, but, as promised, they accepted and we got it. That’s right, gazumping doesn’t ALWAYS work, and I’m so happy that we’ve been able to be living proof of that. It’s not what buying a house is about, and it shouldn’t be accommodated (pun entirely intended).
The next part was the agonising five month wait for the solicitors to get the paperwork in order, but somehow, that all already seems like a distant memory. We finally did it. We’re in and we plan on staying put for many years now, not least to avoid all of the above until we forget how stressful it actually was and go back to naively thinking: it wasn’t that bad, was it?
The Sheffield Blog 