Ruby's Bought a House, Now I want to Own It!

South_coast

Excellent start to the year, and great plans for the year ahead too 👍👍👍

savingholmes

Well done on maxing out the LISA. Just caught up. You are doing so well.

ruby_eskimo

Thanks @South_coast and @savingholmes - doesn't feel like we're making massive progress but I guess we are. 

It's only the 3rd of January and I already had a minor melt down yesterday at the prospect of moving house.  Mainly around higher mortgage payments (compared to what we're paying now) which would mean a serious rejig of our finances and DH actually having to sit down and talk money with me which is something he hates doing.  

On better news DH did win £100 on the premium bonds and I won...nothing 🤣🤣

savingholmes

I suppose the question is - how much do you want to move? What will it give you that you don't have now? What alternatives are there?

If you want to go ahead can you create a nest egg now and put aside the money each month as if you were already on a bigger mortgage? That would then give you reassurance that you could cope or feedback that you wouldn't as well as a bigger nest egg for the move.

It also strikes me from your diary that you like your holidays a lot. Is that something that you would realistically sacrifice for a bigger house or not? Better to work that out ahead of time.

ruby_eskimo

I knew there'd be someone out there with amazing insight - thank you so much @savingholmes for your prompts which have given me food for thought and made me realise that hopefully we're in a better place that I thought!


How much do we want to move?  Instant answer is A LOT but then I look at what's available and it doesn't stack up size wise against our current place for what we can "afford". 

Main driver for us are: a bigger third bedroom / additional study space.  We're both hybrid working and share a work space, which is difficult when you're both on calls which are often sensitive in nature.  So we're constantly decanting to the dining table to get private space.  We can't move one of the desks because we have no room downstairs or in our main bedroom.  Bedroom 3 is where our wardrobes are as they don't fit in the main bedroom and we can't swap a wardrobe for a desk because that also wouldn't work (believe me, we tried at the start of the pandemic!).  But we're going to have to work something out for when we come to sell because it's going to be hard if people think they can only really use 2 of the 3 bedrooms 😆

I would also like a second toilet somewhere, which is ridiculous but there are reasons that I won't go into here 🤣  And we can't put one in here because no space.

DH would like a larger garden.  Not massive but a little bigger so we can have some actual vegetable beds rather than hundreds of pots all over the garden.

I love the village we live in but we back on to the slip road of a major A road and I want a little less road noise.  For most of my life I've lived next to major roads and I always wonder why I don't sleep very well.  So a little more peace would be much appreciated.

But I don't want to pay more for an extra room but less usable space.  There are so many 4 beds up for sale and the main bedroom is smaller than our current one, and when you look at the floor space it actually works out only a couple of sq foot bigger than where we are for A LOT more money.  So I don't want to move for the sake of moving, we've put up with these (and many other) niggles for almost 8 years now.

"If you want to go ahead can you create a nest egg now and put aside the money each month as if you were already on a bigger mortgage?" I don't know why I didn't think of this, it's an amazing idea.  We'd need an extra £600 a month roughly for the mortgage and £50 for the additional council tax and I've just looked at my bank account and have £800 sitting there that's "extra" after the remaining bills come out.  So I've set up a standing order to transfer that £650 to the moving fund and see if I need to touch it or not going forwards. 

It's also the first month my actual pay rise has gone through so now I know how much extra cash I have

It also strikes me from your diary that you like your holidays a lot. Is that something that you would realistically sacrifice for a bigger house or not? Better to work that out ahead of time. We do like to travel but only when we know we can afford it.  I put money aside every month and we book when we have the cash to pay for it (including spending money etc.)  Last year was a fluke because DH came into some inheritance money and wanted to make it up to me for paying for all our holidays for the last 15 years.  In a "normal" year we'd do a European city break for under £200, and then save for a bigger trip every few years.  

So yes I would sacrifice holidays and travel for a bigger house because I'd never put something like that on a credit card.  In fact I'd never put anything on a credit card that I couldn't automatically clear with the cash.

Pollie

A small extension and an allotment---would this be a viable option?

savingholmes

Glad it helped Ruby.

Starting the saving now is a good plan. I am over six months into my moving journey now - despite having 'sold' at the end of August - not helped by the fact I switched house in December. Hopefully things will come together soon. What I am trying to say - is that you could easily have 6-8 months to save towards your new mortgage. Be aware though that moving costs are significant too and consider how you plan to fund those - plus anything you may want/need to do to the new house or any new/2nd hand furniture you may want to buy. 

I would want to move for the road noise issue and the extra toilet never mind the other things. A decent WFH space really helps as does a nice garden. But definitely check out the measurements. EAs routinely lie / make mistakes in about the size of rooms - so I tend to use the EPC as a better guide and house space comparator. Also take your own digital measurer... (and back up manual one).

I like Pollie's suggestion too.

I don't know whether this suggestion is at all realistic - but I've spent a lot of the last four years decluttering - particularly the last two having even emptied my loft. I now have a much greater sense of space than I ever did it - ironically now when I need it less as my adult kids have left the nest and I got divorced. I wish I'd focused on decluttering much earlier in life. I am now able to (slightly) downsize - I still love space and have lots of hobbies and want to keep my options open for kids / future grandkids visits etc. I estimate that I have let 50% of the loose contents of this house go.... I still have more to do - ideally before I move so I'm not paying to cart things I either no longer need or in truth probably never needed.

The other thing to consider if space is tight - is the kind of solutions they use on tiny residences - where kickboards in the kitchen and stairs are drawers, beds are ottomans, tables fold out or back into walls etc. Furniture is multi functional etc. The swedish shop has lots of good ideas for small homes. You may have already exhausted all of those options... but the fold out desks option attached to walls (about £50 each) could help when staging your house for sale - as could those murphy type beds that you pull down from the wall... I think they are about £800 on Am**** although you may be able to find a 2nd hand one...

I only got an offer after spending £15 on a FBMP bed and staging the fourth bedroom to look like one (which cost less than £150). Definitely invest in staging (I did it myself but watched quite a few utubes for inspiration). You want the house to look so nice it would tempt even you to stay... I am so pleased with my home staging purchases though and they are pretty much all coming with me to the new place so well worth it. My buyers even wanted the £15 bed! 

ruby_eskimo

Pollie said:

A small extension and an allotment---would this be a viable option?

Allotment yes, extension no.  We can't extend to the side because our house is on the end of the terrace and the access to half the garages is there (and we'd lose our parking space).  Our garden is only 4.5m "long" (we have an L shaped garden) so any extension at the back would basically take up most of the garden 😞

ruby_eskimo

Thank you @savingholmes.  It took 6 months to go through the purchase on this house so we know that it's not a quick process.  Hope your process completes soon!  I'm budgeting about £12k for moving costs (not including stamp duty) and we have just over half of that already, so adding the additional savings for the "mortgage" will go a long way towards that.  When it comes to furniture etc. we're happy to wait and save for the right stuff so not worried about having to buy stuff straight away.  I still remember being 4 years old and moving into a brand new house and we spent 6 months with no carpet, sitting on tea chests and sleeping on mattresses on the floor because my dad was made redundant the week before we moved and had sold all the old furniture with the view to having all new stuff in a new house.

We're on the decluttering journey and got rid of over 100 items this weekend.  When I phrased it to DH as being "move ready" he was well on board with that.  Long way to go but it's a start.  Was a mixture of clothes and cookery books

Thanks for the advice re: staging.  We learnt a lot helping stage DH's godfather's house for sale so know that we need to move some things around to make it seem like you can actually use the third bedroom. So the plan is

- clear out small built in wardrobe in second bedroom through a combo of decluttering / putting stuff in loft
- decant one of our IKEA pax wardrobes into built in
- take apart IKEA wardrobe and store pieces in loft
- move second wardrobe into main bedroom and be very very careful about opening the door on it (think there's like 2 cm clearance I worked out)
- use our 2 single air mattresses to make a "bed" in the box room to show you can fit a bed in there with a small chest of drawers.

We already have a day bed in the spare bedroom that opens out to a double with a little bit of clearance between the bed and the desks.  Having a fold down desk isn't really practical for us as we both work with two screens because of the work we do

We have thought about switching the doors on the wardrobes to sliding ones so we could just move them around permanently but I begrudge paying money when there isn't really anything wrong with the existing doors.  Obviously will do if they need it in any future properties but don't want to now 😆

And if none of that works then we'll take more drastic action for staging!

ruby_eskimo

So as mentioned we had a bit of decluttering weekend, some was planned some wasn't.  On Friday after work I went downstairs to do my usual workout and while moving the coffee table, realised there was a mouse sitting in the middle of the floor.  Cue a weekend of trying to trap it and now it's somewhere behind the washing machine / sink / fridge freezer in the kitchen.  We have a bunch of traps all downstairs but we did declutter while trying to work out where it was.  I'm leaving it to DH to sort because I now can't go into the kitchen knowing it's in there somewhere.  Can deal with witnessing open heart surgery, feeding owls with whole chicks, gutting fish, clear up every type of bodily fluid but a cute little mouse sends me over the edge 🤣