Next time ...

bbuckle

You've just 'completed', or you are about to. The weeks and months of stress and sleepless nights are coming to an end. You've survived the viewings, the survey, the mortgage application, the removal quotes and the packing up of belongings - not to mention the solicitor questions.

As you sit down and put your feet up for the first time in your new home, you wonder that if you had to do this all again, you would do some things differently.

What are they?

walwyn1978

Accept that the other party in the deal is not as quick as me at filling out paperwork, sorting mortgages etc and thus delays are merely part of the process and outside of my control.

moneyistooshorttomention

1. Do my own packing (rather than paying the removal firm to do so) or have a friend helping me to supervise the packers. This so that I ended the journey with all the possessions i had the day before the packers came in - and spotted a couple of my possessions they wanted:cool:

2. Check out the situation very carefully re neighbours - though, in hindsight, I can't see that I'd have been able to buy a house in a small town (where it appears many of the houses for sale don't actually make it to the estate agent websites I've now found) and get one with less problems.

3. If it was built before, say, 1980 (maybe even a few years later than that) I'd automatically say "total rewire" and have everything but everything electrical ripped-out. That - even if surveyor and any electrician I had in didn't say it needed it (which they didn't:mad:). I'd only pass on that if I had proof in writing it had already been rewired.

4. Check out whether the tradespeople in any new area I moved to were equivalent to reliability etc levels to what I was used to - or better.

5. Put in a loft ladder (if the house didn't already have one) pretty soon after getting the house - so it was there in place for all the traipsing to and fro the loft tradespeople do (and for me to traipse up there after them checking on them).

6. Bear in mind what a shortie I am before having the wall cupboards put up in my new kitchen - so that I don't end up having to have them taken off the walls and put lower down.

7. Specify every last little detail - in writing - to tradespeople, rather than taking it for granted for instance that, of course, decorators do the prep work before putting the paint up:cool::mad:

8. Try not to let getting (understandably) upset with any tradespeople that leave something to be desired and/or neighbours ditto lead to a glass or two of wine to console oneself about it too often and/or thinking "I cba to prepare a proper meal for myself - what can I grab quickest?". Not unless you've got a really good metabolism for fat-burning - otherwise, when it all calms down, you've got weeks on a diet to get your figure back after the wine and scratch meals (if you're one of the minority that "have a decent figure" in the first place).

Davesnave

Nothing to declare, but there may not be a next time anyway.

Perhaps we'd not waste as much time trying to make properties fit our brief, but if that's very different from what went before, the 'tough jigsaw effect' is part of the learning process.

There were no sleepless nights. There probably should have been, but our view is that stuff happens and then you deal with it.

Maybe that's what we've learned.

Marvel1

Waited a bit longer, as the crash happened, then again cant predict these things and buying alone was hard enough with the prices.

lookstraightahead

Try not to get divorced 6 months after moving lol!

I wouldnt place my happiness on the house I was in, rather the important things in life. If things fall through, so be it. Chill with it all. Life's too short.

quantumlobster

Check all the external plumbing - i.e. flush the loo, check the drains, ask about the gutters. If poss, go and have a stalky-creepy look at the house when it's raining to check the latter.

"What are you doing, standing there on the pavement, in the rain?"

"I'm looking at your gutters."

>licks lips<


This was an oversight on my part that cost me £700 to rectify - cracked soil pipe, blocked drain, bust gutter.

00ec25

bbuckle wrote: »

, you would do some things differently.

What are they?

not listen to what strangers on the internet "advised" me to do

Davesnave

00ec25 wrote: »

not listen to what strangers on the internet "advised" me to do

But you give advice on here all the time!:rotfl:


Sometimes, people need advice to help them think clearly, by taking their minds into places they'd rather not go.

moneyistooshorttomention

Or solutions they may not be able to think of themselves.

I know I still wonder if I'd put up a thread saying "How to stay in home city - but move to a dearer house - with retirement looming but stuck with a Revised State Pension Age being rather further away" whether anyone else would have been able to think up the solution to that problem I and my friends couldnt think up (rack brains as we did).

I doubt they would have been any better able to think of the solution to that any more than I could - but, in hindsight, think perhaps I should have at least tried - as "You never know - there might have been one and I missed it".

I have learnt quite a lot of other useful stuff from MSE though....

If there's one thing I can see clearly now is that the vast majority of people live in their own little social circles and think that's "how things are" - and there may be other ways of thinking that are useful to them that other social circles know about - but their own one doesn't.

cannyshopper_2

I wouldn't buy a property thinking "oh we can easily change that" or "that's only a minor thing to fix" now that I know my other half isn't a DIY enthusiast. And I'd get one with a garden that's easier to maintain!