Buying and selling a house... the never-ending saga

They say moving house and getting married are two of the most stressful things you can do. Well, we can leave aside getting married – that was a doddle; don’t understand the fuss. Set a budget, stick to it, keep the traditions you want but don’t stick slavishly to them – it’s your wedding day; do it your way.

Moving house on the other hand...

I’ve decided to split this blog post in two. The next part focuses on buying; this part of the story is all about selling, and it begins last September when, having both started jobs in London, me and my wife decided we would sell our South Coast home in Fareham and find something a little closer to London. After all, five hours spent commuting every day meant weekdays consisted of little more than eating, travelling, working and sleeping, and we were both in a state of perpetual tiredness. It had to stop.

So we put our house on the market, and to our delight, we had half a dozen viewings in the first week. I was pleased at the interest, but not terribly surprised, for ours was a modestly priced, pretty little terraced cottage, great for first timers and downsizers alike. In that first week, we even received offers. Three – all from the same people. The first was derisory, the second not much better, but the third – being on the cusp of acceptable - gave us a tough decision. In the end we accepted, and they pulled out, but we were left feeling positive. It wasn’t supposed to be this easy to sell a property, and we’d nearly sold the place in a few days. At this rate, we’d sell in no time.

Well, we didn’t.

Christmas came and went – by this time, the house had been on the market for months – but without success. We’d had plenty of viewings, but nobody willing to take the plunge. But the fact that the viewings continued gave us reason to be optimistic. People were at least coming through the door, and sure enough, two weeks into the New Year, there was a breakthrough. That holy grail of an offer; the first in ages. It was just under our asking price, but more than acceptable, and we were on our way out.

But, of course, it isn’t quite as easy as that. Despite the fact that we had no onward chain and our buyers were coming out of rented and had no chain of their own, it took three months from the day we accepted an offer to actually moving out. Included in that three months was one of the most stressful episode of my life.

You’ll remember the damaging and almost unprecedented bad weather we had during the winter months. Our fence was one of the casualties. Being on the right hand side of the garden, this was ‘our’ fence, so we took responsibility for it, and told our neighbour that we’d replace the five fences that were blown down. But what we didn’t want to do was put a new one up while the winds were still howling; it would only blow over again. So we waited a while. For our next door neighbour, it was a wait too long.

The fence only accounted for about a third of the length of our garden, the rest was made up with a knee high brick wall. That was until, fed up with a gap where the fence used to be between our garden and hers, she tried to force the issue by knocking down the way herself. Fuming, I went next door, where unrepentantly, she said her provocative act at least “got a reaction” out of us. From this point she was keen for us to split the cost of a new fence down the entire length of the garden, including the two thirds of it where the hitherto undamaged brick wall had been. Simply unbelievable. We could scarcely believe someone could act so disgracefully; you hear about nightmare neighbours, but it’s the sort of thing that always happens to someone else.

One of the most worrying things about this development was the fact that we’d accepted an offer on our house before she’d knocked the wall down. The new buyers would be expecting a brick wall, not a pile of bricks. Many phone calls to the estate agent, solicitor followed, as well as increasingly fractious letters between us and our next door neighbour. She was not happy for us to pay for the cost of the original fences that blew down. We decided to cut her out of the negotiations and agreed to pay the incoming buyer a small amount toward the cost of a replacement fence. It was a shame that the last few months of an otherwise pleasant three year stay had been soured.

But would buying a new house be any easier? (spoiler: no). I'll talk about that in the next blog post.