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.