So... Trying to buy a place then.

One of the things to remember when looking for a prospective place to buy is that none of the houses you'll see are perfect. The sellers will paper over all the cracks and where ever you finally live will have problems.

We were looking for as much space as possible. Preferably 3 bedrooms for under £150k. In anywhere in SE England except 3 places that was impossible. Those 3 places were Bletchly near Milton Keynes, Sheerness and Medway, both in Kent. The choice was easy. Medway was the biggest and afterall somewhere with a Cathedral and at least 3 Castles had to be nice. Rochester itself was slightly more expensive, so in the end we plumped for Strood or Chatham. Strood had the nicer houses but Chatham had the better transport to London and our hometowns. We had got to the stage where we were choosing between 2 places. 1 final house came through from the Estate Agents and we went to see it.

3 bedroom, (semi-)converted basement, a bathroom, a showeroom (both with toilet), a utility room, through-lounge, fitted kitchen and garage, all within 10 mins of station! And the price was very very good. We had decided that this was the one and as we knew it was probably under valued, we offered the asking price. Within 30 seconds we had exceptance. But that was where the problems began.

Firstly due to many different excuses from the sellers, we were only allowed to see the place again once more. They were also very obscure when we were asking questions about the house. There were many other issues such as the fittings and the fact that they managed to squeeze another £2k out of us when they claimed that they'd received a better offer. Our solicitor had never had so many problems with the seller of a house! Finally 5 months after having our offer accepted, we completed.

The house is ok to look at, but as with a lot of places around there, the houses were cheap Dockers houses, and in the years since they were built, owners have either not been well-enough off to sort all the problems out or they have been, like us, 1st time buyers who did not want to plough thousands of £s into somewhere that we'd move out of in a couple of years.

Living Together?

We had been seeing each other for a few months and I spotted an article about reasonably priced new-builds being built about 30 miles away, yet still commutable to London. You see the areas of London that we lived in were not super high priced, yet we still could not afford anywhere bigger than a 1 Bed flat. So our first Christmas together was when I asked her if she'd get a place with me. Both of us were still living with with our families. She burst into happy tears and said yes.

We looked at the plans for these reasonable new builds, but they didn't grab us. They were quite small, and had paper thin walls. We started to look at places in between and found that there was a huge difference in prices for places in these certain collection of towns. Up to half as expensive as our hometowns 20 miles away. This collection of towns had a Cathedral, numerous historic places, a river and over a quarter of a million people.

We started looking and soon found 3 bed houses at the type of price they should be in the rest of London and SE England.

Background (bringing you up to date)

So whats with the wrong little date above then?

This Blog should be dated 04/08/09
____________________________________________________________________
Quickly then:
Me - born 1977, Virgo, suburban Londoner, BSc Degree (2:2), eldest of 3 boys.

Her - born 1984, Leo, suburban Londoner (but slightly further out), started BA Degree but had more fun drinking and socialising (Womens Rugby!), a younger brother.

We both have Welsh Ancesters, alongside our London ones. We met through friends that are no longer together. I took gentle advantage of an inebriated lady, then treated her mean for a couple of weeks to cement interest. (I had my fingers burnt previous to this relationship). Once I was sure that she was interested, we clicked really well.

Due to house prices being too high in our London Borough, we bought a house in a large historic maritime town about 20 miles away after being together for 1 1/2 years. We've been here 2 1/2 years and had been gently reminded that we wouldn't have kids unless we were married (having just become Uncle & Aunty to my middle brother, and being nagged by her best friend.

You'll get to know more as time goes on.