Structural work on home before purchase (or not)

Archergirl

The property is perfect other than one issue - the living room and dining room are both too small.

Not very perfect then, I would keep looking.

livetoclimb

Thanks for your advice everybody - I completely appreciate what is being said.

I'm terms of my 'expectations', they were never meant to be unreasonable. Given that there is a builder currently living in the house who said he'd be happy to work on it, I thought it worth asking - I unfortunately didn't forsee these complications, and I'm quite happy to come around to being 'reasonable' in terms of accepting the most mutually beneficial solution.

I'm going to discuss it with the EA, and we'll agree on what's best. The house isn't actually let down by the size of the two rooms (they're both perfectly usable!), but the EA recommended asking, and as the vendor is a developer (refurbished) I felt it worth asking at the start of the process, and when it was accepted I (naively!) assumed that this wasn't necessarily out of the ordinary. Honestly, if he's happy to help us out with the cost of work done then that's great. If it doesn't work out that way then the house is still perfect for us and we can look at doing any work separately down the line. The cats wellbeing obviously isn't a bargaining chip or a real issue, and in fact we'll look have a reasonable period to move in after completion so can move the cats in after most of their familiar furniture is already in. Or they can go on holiday to my parents.

I do have a 'rainy day/emergency' fund of 6 months of mortgage payments on top of the cost of the house, but I see that as earmarked for the event of job loss or a real emergency, not just some building work that we want rather than need. I agree its probably better to accept it as-is and do the work myself down the line - this is what I will look to do.

Finally, I absolutely do not want to move the risk and stress onto anyone else. I'm pretty resilient and am quite happy to take the inconvenience myself to avoid needlessly aggravating others.

Again thanks all for giving me some perspective; as a FTB I'm quite happy to learn some lessons from this process and you've all helped me see things rather more clearly.