Buying a house is like online dating. I say that having had experience of both. Before having met The Incredible Davey (he requested a superhero pseudonym, we shall refer to him as TID henceforth) I discovered that in order to be an effective online dater, you need to date like a man... by having at least three men who you're going on dates with at a time (not all together). It means that if one isn't as responsive as you'd like or you decide you don't like another, there are still two more to keep you amused. And the same applies when looking for houses!
The similarities in the two experiences are uncanny:
1. You do both online.
2. It's brutal.
3. You need to be prepared to have your heart broken.
4. It takes hours of trawling to find one that you might like.
5. The photo's are often misleading.
6. You can 'try before you buy' but just the tip. You don't really know what's under the 'bonnet' until you're entrenched in the relationship.
It's been a while since I've posted and this experience has encouraged me to get writing again. TID and I seem to spend hours and hours on Rightmove and occasionally Zoopla essentially trolling for our new home. Any property with a vague nice-ness or potential of potential is liked and then poured over numerous times.
It's going to be seriously hard to find a house with a river frontage like this with our budget, but hey it's worth trying!
When we got serious and stopped looking at the £1.5M properties with a river frontage and attractive period features (versus the unattractive period features of the +_1960's and 1970's properties) we opened a new email account with a pretty ridiculous name to filter all of the emails sent from the estate agents and because there was absolutely no way I was going to give them my actual address. And this is already paying off because for some reason certain agents seem to think that we're interested in areas, sizes and prices that we specifically didn't ask for. Begrudgingly I handed over my mobile number and now also receive calls about said properties 'have I seen the email that was sent five minutes ago, during a busy work day?' to what is clearly a private email account???
What I particularly enjoy is when the agents ask how I'm planning on paying for a property that I've expressed interest in? 'Well Mr Agent what I'm actually going to do is take out several credit cards and incur a massive, crushing credit card debt' or 'I plan on winning the lottery, which reminds me, I need to buy a ticket.' Heaven forbid I should be a normal person and pay for it using a *shhh, whisper this* mortgage.
I won't go into the details of each property that I've liked, really it's only me who would find that interesting. Suffice to say that as first time buyers, we're skipping the 'starter home' and are moving straight onto the 'family home'... but with the starter home budget.
So we've got a search on our hands and will probably be looking at a complete fixer-upper that is only vaguely liveable in, but which we will persuade ourselves is actually okay for the next x years until we can afford to do it up... By which time we will have won the lottery and it will be substantially more than the £2.70 I got excited about last week!
The similarities in the two experiences are uncanny:
1. You do both online.
2. It's brutal.
3. You need to be prepared to have your heart broken.
4. It takes hours of trawling to find one that you might like.
5. The photo's are often misleading.
6. You can 'try before you buy' but just the tip. You don't really know what's under the 'bonnet' until you're entrenched in the relationship.
It's been a while since I've posted and this experience has encouraged me to get writing again. TID and I seem to spend hours and hours on Rightmove and occasionally Zoopla essentially trolling for our new home. Any property with a vague nice-ness or potential of potential is liked and then poured over numerous times.
When we got serious and stopped looking at the £1.5M properties with a river frontage and attractive period features (versus the unattractive period features of the +_1960's and 1970's properties) we opened a new email account with a pretty ridiculous name to filter all of the emails sent from the estate agents and because there was absolutely no way I was going to give them my actual address. And this is already paying off because for some reason certain agents seem to think that we're interested in areas, sizes and prices that we specifically didn't ask for. Begrudgingly I handed over my mobile number and now also receive calls about said properties 'have I seen the email that was sent five minutes ago, during a busy work day?' to what is clearly a private email account???
What I particularly enjoy is when the agents ask how I'm planning on paying for a property that I've expressed interest in? 'Well Mr Agent what I'm actually going to do is take out several credit cards and incur a massive, crushing credit card debt' or 'I plan on winning the lottery, which reminds me, I need to buy a ticket.' Heaven forbid I should be a normal person and pay for it using a *shhh, whisper this* mortgage.
I won't go into the details of each property that I've liked, really it's only me who would find that interesting. Suffice to say that as first time buyers, we're skipping the 'starter home' and are moving straight onto the 'family home'... but with the starter home budget.
So we've got a search on our hands and will probably be looking at a complete fixer-upper that is only vaguely liveable in, but which we will persuade ourselves is actually okay for the next x years until we can afford to do it up... By which time we will have won the lottery and it will be substantially more than the £2.70 I got excited about last week!