In budget..at last.

lostinrates

oldMcDonald wrote: »

Yes, the area we went to look at is the area we are planning to move to! It was a b***er of a drive with two Springer Spaniels and 5 kids - you only do that kind of thing if you are serious!!

LOL, the worst drive I did was moving to Italy with the cats in the car. 17 hours of siamese cat song. They generally like a drive, but it was too long. I take dog-dog in the car for all our viewings, becuse I try and go for a walk in areas we like...but ours are more like 200 mile round trips.

Two springer spaniels and five kids? You must be superhuman to live with that family, let alone drive that long with them!:D

oldMcDonald

lostinrates wrote: »

I take dog-dog in the car for all our viewings, becuse I try and go for a walk in areas we like...but ours are more like 200 mile round trips.

That's one of our 'house tests', too! Springers need long, long walks!

lostinrates wrote: »

Two springer spaniels and five kids? You must be superhuman to live with that family, let alone drive that long with them!:D

Nah, I spend my entire life curled up in the corner, sobbing.

Davesnave

We sometimes take the ferrets, but they are dead easy, as long as it isn't a hot day. After their relatively sedate 20minute walk, they curl up and we don't see much of them for the rest of the trip, or sundown, whichever comes first. They go in a specially adapted dog cage thing.

lostinrates

Davesnave wrote: »

We sometimes take the ferrets, but they are dead easy, as long as it isn't a hot day. After their relatively sedate 20minute walk, they curl up and we don't see much of them for the rest of the trip, or sundown, whichever comes first. They go in a specially adapted dog cage thing.

DH would love ferrets but I hate to put animals in hutches. I think the cats and ferrets would be a poor idea too.

Davesnave

lostinrates wrote: »

DH would love ferrets but I hate to put animals in hutches. I think the cats and ferrets would be a poor idea too.

On the whole, I agree about caged animals, but if you saw ours straining at the lead to get home from their walk in the park, you wouldn't be too concerned about them! They love their two homes.(one multi-storey 4 floors and the other one a big run with regularly-changed play equipment.)

Eric, the stroppy one, actually decides how far he'll walk. When he's had enough, he just refuses to budge.

The cats aren't a problem. They seem to sense that if they tried anything they'd get it back in spades, so they adopt an air of total disinterest, much as they do with foxes. It's dogs we have to watch. If there's a lot of those in the park, we can use the Botanic Garden. There's a notice saying 'No dogs,' but it doesn't mention ferrets, and no one's complained.

penguine

FWIW ... we almost bought two houses last year. The first one ticked the boxes, but we'd never have put in an offer if we hadn't still been of the mistaken opinion that house prices would keep going up. We had a very lucky escape, because the survey turned up so many things wrong with it that we took a look around and realised prices were falling, and this wasn't the only house we'd ever be able to buy. We pulled out just days before we were due to exchange.

Second time around ... in June we put in an offer on what a few years ago would have been my dream house, a Victorian very close to our high street, train station, bus routes, my daughter's school and her favourite park. It needed a lot of work but we could have done it up exactly as we liked -- we worked out what we could afford and put in an offer (at £60k less than asking price). It went back and forth a few times over several months -- the sellers turned down our offer a couple of times, the owner died and the estate went into probate, and in October the EA phoned us up to ask if we were still interested as it had just gone back on the market at the final price we'd offered (£50k below original asking price).

By then we knew house prices had a lot further to fall. We talked about it for a few days but we walked away again -- this was probably the 3rd time. And considering I had loved the house on a first viewing, it was surprisingly painless. I haven't regretted it (not even when a month or so later it turned out a friend of a friend was about to buy the same house).

For me it didn't just come down to the possibility of being able to get a better house at a cheaper price in a year or two's time (although I hope that turns out to be the case). What I keep thinking about is our quality of life -- we have mostly by chance lived through this huge property bubble in a 2-bed flat, feeling pretty cramped most of the time. But it will be worth hanging in there another year or two if it means we'll have a small, manageable mortgage at the end of it -- which means we don't have to work ridiculous hours just to have a roof over our heads.

Cannon_Fodder

Dan: wrote: »

That means it was last sold before the year 2000.

http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/ does pre-2000...might be worth a look...

lostinrates

Cannon_Fodder wrote: »

http://www.ourproperty.co.uk/ does pre-2000...might be worth a look...

Hmm, there seems to be some problem registering there....it won't accept my address, despite having found it via its postcode serach

lostinrates

All right.....where are the 70% club, I need cheering up.:(

It went on at new price on Friday, today its under offer. They had a good offer on Friday afternoon and a lower cash offer on Saturday and they have accepted the lower cash offer for speed. Lucky buyers!

I don't think I can be accused of draggin my feet over this timescale in this market, even had I viewed today it would have been too late...our offer would have been cheeky and we couldn't compete with the timescale of cash as we'd need to try and finance and I'm fully aware we were punching above our weight here in budget and affordability.

Having had a little weep I'm trying to be positive. This will ultimately be a wonderful home for the buyer, so someone will be very happy tonight. Also, it can't help but have an impact on pricing. It was on with two agents covering the areas I'm looking in and will go someway towards indicating current land price, in a downwards way. we may also have been saved a short trip to povertyville.

The moral to sellers is; this is in a 'good' price bracket. It was in a 'very good' price bracket at 40% more last week and that reduction saw a quick cash sale. It was not a forced, the sellers have already bought else where (and therefore in this bracket are seriously loaded, lol).



Thank you all for the feedback and for listening to my bleating

Kez100

I know it looked amazing to you but it was really out of your price range and that is why it looked so good - it was better than anything you could have reasonably dreamed of. There is always that next step house that we'd love to live in but would we feel the same if we lived there and the interest rates boomed so as to give financial difficulties?

I think this was for the best. And you have had some fun!