How do you know if the house is THE ONE?

robatwork

[Deleted User] said:

MeteredOut said:

[Deleted User] said:

Most British houses are crap. As you have found, "3 bedrooms" is often 2 bedrooms and a cupboard. Almost none of them have been designed well. Terraces and badly laid out estates mean there is always a possibility of neighbour problems.

I could go on, you get the point.

So figure out what is important, and what is essential, and prepare to compromise on everything else. It feels wrong paying so much for something so compromised and outright bad in many aspects, but that's life here in Britain.

Not one for this thread, but I'd be interested (in a new thread) for your full list of reasons why "most British houses are crap". That's certainly not been my experience across the multiple houses I've bought and sold.

You need to live in a better country for a while, learn what their houses are like.

Our new estates are indeed embarrassingly crap of design (old fashioned), layout, space and quality.

Murphybear

We were house hunting a few years ago.  We had a house to sell which didn’t have a mortgage so we had a good deposit.  We started looking at bungalows in villages and saw quite a lot.  We viewed one in a tiny village only 15 minutes from where I worked.  The village was no theough road so was quiet.  The bungalow was detached with gardens all round, there were 2 ponds, a greenhouse, workshop and small conservatory.  It was very old fashioned and needed a new kitchen and bathroom but as soon as we saw it we exchanged a look which said “this is the one”.  

We bought it and spent 2 years refurbing it.  A few years later we had to sell it as we were moving 200 miles.

i still miss that bungalow 

theoretica

Is 'the one' helpful language here?  I found it more useful to think of a dividing line of 'good enough' which I had to lower a bit until there were properties that qualified which I could actually afford.  But it wasn't just one property, there were quite a few.

YoungBlueEyes

theoretica said:

Is 'the one' helpful language here?  I found it more useful to think of a dividing line of 'good enough' which I had to lower a bit until there were properties that qualified which I could actually afford.  But it wasn't just one property, there were quite a few.

^^^ This, all day long. 

It seems not to matter what your budget is, there will always be compromises. We found a few houses that were 'good enough' so when one got knocked off the list (neighbour building a monstrous extension) we moved onto the next one that was 'good enough'. Been here 18 months now and it's fine. 

Don't let all the talk of "wow factor" and "forever home" and "dream house" cause you to miss out on one that'd do you rightly. 

BlueVeranda

For us, it was the street that was "the one". During lockdown we, like many others, took our daily exercise by looking for new routes around the town. We found ourselves on one quiet road we'd never been to before and said "wow, we want to live HERE!"

We were lucky that a suitable house came up on that street shortly after so now we do live here. But tying into the "good enough" idea above, there were in fact a few listed at about the same time, and the one we bought isn't the first one we viewed.

I'm sure that if it turned out we hadn't liked any of the houses on the street, we'd have found a "good enough" house on another, similar street and we would have been happy with that outcome, too.

amysquie

We had an offer accepted on a place that seemed to tick the boxes in terms of location and so on, but we let it go because the lease had a doubling ground rent clause, and I realised I never really liked it. We kept looking and after seeing a lot of tiny flats, found the perfect one. The listing didn't look anything special, but it was the first one where we got in the car afterwards, looked at each other and said "I want it!". Up until then we'd had to weigh up the pros and cons. Saying that, it won't be our forever home, but it's perfect for our needs at the moment. We have the tiny 3rd room too, which serves as my office. The larger one is our guest room/my husband's office. With a desk, sofa bed and TV it makes a good chillout room where he can go and watch his fave sports!