BritishBibliophile Wants A House

drcee

Hi BB! I just sat and read your entire thread on my commute home. You are such an inspiration and have given me so many ideas for money saving. Eventually, I would like to save for a house but at the moment we are saving to move because of my health issues. I am subscribing to your thread.

Congratulations on your engagement! Those twiddly things do work :-D

DrCee

BritishBibliophile

Aww thank you drcee, I hope your savings go well and you're able to get to a place that helps you recover! :beer:

So today the last day of the month and that means it's money shufflin' time! £200 in the HTB ISA, £300 to the wedding as planned, and I was able to move another £204.81 in to the house deposit as I was REALLY good with my spending last month (Rome was expensive but I'd saved a lot of my spending money in cash in the months before so didn't need to take out loads before we left).

We also found our wedding venue, turns out this wedding thing is much easier than finding a house! :rotfl: So easy to make a decision when you can't afford anything over £1000 and can only find one venue in a whole county that's under that limit. Going to email to book that this week and we get 20% off if we pay off the cost before the end of June, so we'll use the discount to get some extra hours for the reception as the fee only covers a few hours.

Sent Gentleman Caller the spreadsheet I'd created and while he's excited about the wedding he's less excited about the long "Things To Do" list that I included, so I've told him that most of it is for me and he'll just be required for back up, or technical/finer details (for example, he'll be putting the wedding invites together as I can't stick things neatly. I'll write the text and buy the supplies and post them out, but he'll need to actually make them ). His Mum is also quite excited by it all and has offered to help out with making decorations and things for the big day, so that'll be a big help.

New Deposit Total - £11483.42
New Wedding Total - £455.00/£4000

drcee

Once we have moved house, hubby and I plan to open two HTB ISAs - one each. Glad to hear you have found a wedding venue. I thought I had done well finding a venue for £3500. Does that £1000 include all of your food? A wee tip for you. You can buy loads of wedding items second hand on You and Your Wedding forum. I bought so much on there and saved a small fortune.

BritishBibliophile

Oooh thank you for the tip drcee, it's around £600 for the venue, we can have both the ceremony and the reception there but they'll be in the same space, so we have to disappear for 30 minutes for the staff to set up. Still very cheap though, most places were charging £2000+ for the venue plus £40 a head for the food and demanding we had a minimum number of guests :eek: What do you do if people cancel, drag randoms off the street? :rotfl: We then need to book the registrar (another £400, bloody councils :mad: ) and then it's just the little details, like a wedding dress

TT of £3.33 in to the house deposit. Possibly going to view a house on Saturday, need to chase the estate agent first thing tomorrow morning. I called them yesterday, the place has tenants (students) so they needed to get permission from them to show us round. I don't mind needing permission, I fully understand it, just wish they'd hurry up and say yes or no! The student's contract ends in July, but we wouldn't exchange until confirmation of vacant possession anyway. Just want to see how much work it'll need after years of early adult abuse :rotfl:

Football starts next weekend, wish I could say I have faith in England, but mostly I'm just looking forward to seeing some (hopefully) decent football.

New deposit total: £11486.75

savingwannabe

Lol to 'dragging randoms off street'. Good luck with new housey hope it is right for you and a good price. Well done on savings. Good luck England in footy.

drcee

That's a bargain for the venue. Did you check reviews etc before booking? Are you going to go down the second-hand route for the dress? I wish I did. My dress was almost £2000 and I have worn it once haha. It is currently hanging in my wardrobe taking up space. My husband won't let me sell it.

BritishBibliophile

Didn't see the house in the end as the tenants couldn't do a time that we needed, estate agents were a bit useless and phoned me up twice about exactly the same thing. Asked for a viewing on Tuesday, me and Gentleman Caller have booked the day off in the hope that they'll be able to arrange something with the students living there. Going to have to chase them first thing tomorrow morning though as they didn't phoned to confirm yesterday.

Had a bit of a disappointment as we decided to go to another house in the same area that was having an open day. Quite a few people there when we arrived. House was nice enough, needed some TLC but wasn't in a dreadful state, didn't tick all the boxes but then we can't afford all the boxes :rotfl: It's up for £215k, we ended up making an offer of £195k, thinking we could/would put it up by £5k if the vendor said no.

In the end the agent phoned while we were out at lunch with both sets of parents to tell us that a much higher offer had been made, and that in order to get it would we need to "pretty much asking price". That's too far above our budget so we had to decline.

I wasn't too upset at the time as it wasn't perfect, but it was the first one we'd seen that both of us agreed we could live in. But as the rest of the day wore on I got a bit more disappointed over it as I really just want to have our home now. I've been living on my parent's sofa for 10 months now, I've only been able to see Gentleman Caller for 10 months, and I've had my entire life in storage for...you guessed it, 10 months.

And then I see all this horrible news on the TV and think that I should just get over it. I'm lucky that I love Gentleman Caller and we're never going to be persecuted for loving each other. I live in a pretty safe country, I still have a roof over my head and food on the table, I should be grateful instead of disappointed.

Still wish I had a damn house though. God help the estate agents if they don't have a positive response for me tomorrow, I might get slightly sarcastic.

savingwannabe

Accomodation is such an important element of self. Maslow's Hierarchy says it is the most basic need so no wonder the current situation can stress you out. You are doing all you can all you need it luck. When it comes you will be ready. Keeping my fingers crossed for you BB.

BritishBibliophile

Thank you savingwannabe, I never really thought of living space like that before but it makes a lot of sense.

So the estate agent saga continued - after confirming the viewing for Tuesday we both took the day off and decided to drive around the area after a late lunch. Early afternoon we got a phonecall from the estate agent, the vendor had accepted an offer on the property and our viewing was now cancelled.

I was driving and Gentleman Caller had my phone and was pulling an angry face so I pulled over in to a side street and he passed it over to me. The first thing out of my mouth was "Did the buyer offer full asking price?", agent went "Er, no" as if it was a stupid question to ask, so I went "Well then we'd still like to see it".

Got put on hold while he spoke to someone else in the office, then came back and said that as long as we were happy with one of the tenants showing us around then it would be fine. They then phoned again 40 minutes later to inform us that a tenant would be showing us around the house as the agent was booked in to another viewing, you really couldn't make it up!

Eventually got through the front door, met three very charming students who were happy to let us wander around the whole place. Nice size kitchen, good sized living room with a view over a very overgrown back garden (good for us as we would like a little project), but the ceiling in the living room had a very obvious patch of fresh paint. Extremely obvious because the ceiling was white and the patch was cream :rotfl: Pointed it out to one of the students and asked about it, he explained that it was underneath the bathroom, and they'd had drips coming out of that patch of ceiling in the past! Then proceeded to warn us about the agency as they were "dreadful". A bathroom of the inspection showed that the drip problem was condensation, the bathroom is internal with no window and only a tiny little extractor fan, plus tiles from floor to ceiling. Black mould was growing all along the edge of the bathtub, green mould was growing on the ceiling, and the bathroom stank of damp :eek:

Oddly enough though the rest of the house was genuinely quite nice, or would be once it was properly lived in and looked after. After speaking to the in-laws (renovated their previous house) and my brother (carpenter) and realised that there were solutions open to us, I phoned up first thing Wednesday morning and offered full asking price. This might seem a bit odd for a bathroom that bad, but the market in the area is quite hot at the moment and most stuff appears to be going for asking, plus this house has already been reduced by £5k so getting it lower would have been more difficult.

Anyway, spent the whole of yesterday feeling really nervous and anxious, didn't get much work done. They phoned up at lunch time today to say they'd had "several" offers in the end (to be fair the tenants did say they'd had a lot of people around last week and on Monday) and the vendor had decided to go with someone else.

Mixed bag of emotions, on the one hand I was starting to think about the house seriously and think how we would decorate certain rooms and investigated the costs of getting the bathroom sorted. But on the other hand I'm relieved that I don't have to deal with those estate agents again, they were so useless, I've had to chase them constantly. I don't care if they've got a developer in their pocket and they've persuaded the vendor to accept a lower offer, and I don't care if someone has offered £1k over asking price and is a cash buyer, they've saved us a great deal of suspected hassle.

On to the next house, hopefully it'll be ours! :j

savingwannabe

Well done in doing research and and in making offer that was brave. You did everything correctly (research, sensible offer, discussions with Gentleman Caller) and we just have to accept that it wasn't meant to be when it is the house will be perfect for you.

If Brexit happens (I don't want it to but think it will) one blessing that you might benefit from is that property prices will fall so hold on. Especially for locations close to London when all the foreign MNCs move out. Your savings will go much further then BB.