Buying a new house sounds like a good idea until you actually try to do it. You set out all the things you simply must have, as well as the things you'd like to have (in addition to all the things you already have, which somehow get taken for granted) and away you go. Looking at houses. First you look on on the very wonderful Rightmove site, which now shows floorplans at last, and has lots of lovely pictures, and is really good all round, filling you with a dangerous sense of optimism that your dreams may come true. And then you do viewings, which is where it all comes crashing down.
Firstly, there's the problem that nothing's perfect, and there are always new and unexpected ways to compromise what seemed like a good candidate. That's the "it's up a dirt track next to a chicken farm" syndrome, which somehow they always fail to mention in the description. Sometimes these factors can be weeded out by a drive-by, but sometimes you have to waste a lot of time meeting estate agents to find out something that you aren't going to overlook when you find out about it. Access limitations (which are the bane of camper van owners) are never mentioned on the details.
Then, there's the problem of wide-angle lenses completely changing the appearance of spaces. Sometimes you get a clue - like a single internal door that appears to be 6ft wide - but sometimes not. And slopes! For some reason, it seems to be impossible to correctly detect sloping drives from an estate agent's photograph. And they always slope, at least in or around Exeter. Sometimes precipitously.
 |
| Precipitous |
All together, the chance of viewing a house and being NOT being disappointed within the first few minutes is extremely low. I think we have seen about three which didn't dash our well-intentioned optimism immediately - sometimes before even opening the door. Out of 34 viewings. So far.
And obviously, every single one you go to see is either no good, or you can't buy it for some reason - right up until the until the last one, which is where you stop.
You might think that you could say "OK, we've given it our best shot, and there just isn't anywhere within our budget which fits the bill. We'll just stay where we are, have a G&T and admire our lovely view some more" but actually the process gradually becomes utterly addictive - it's so easy to look on line (even without Rightmove's text alert system) that after a while you can't stop looking. After all, the next one you see might just be the one, might it not?
There have been a few slightly amusing incidents along the way. In one 1930's house, seemingly still occupied by the couple who bought it new, and decorated from top to bottom in deeply textured wallpaper covered in many layers of worn gloss paint, a slightly desperate estate agent encouragingly pointed out several times that the decor was "quite neutral". We didn't make an offer.
There is a whole class of newer houses which are just like normal houses, but with everything scaled down in size. Presumably fewer and fewer people actually swing their cats nowadays. I suppose if one harboured aspirations to feel like Gandalf, this design idea might actually work in one's favour. We didn't make an offer.
Another (very expensive) house had a lovely view of the Exe river valley from the living room - almost completely obscured by the blank gable end of the house in front, about 20ft away. Didn't mention that in the details, did you? We didn't make an offer.
The last but one house we saw was "a truly outstanding property" featuring five bedrooms, four bathrooms (plus downstairs cloakroom) and a dining room whose extraordinary dimensions (3.4m x 2.95m, including the floor space used up by the double doors) could accommodate as many as four of the occupants eating simultaneously. Or even more, if they all agreed to eat standing up. We didn't make an offer.
Of course, it doesn't help that our must-have list includes a double garage and somewhere to park the van, which two criteria narrow the field considerably around here. And be within a 15min drive of the house of luuurve, for ease of grandparenting.
Despite all this, we think we might just have done it. Our offer has been accepted on a house in Exminster, which we both liked immediately. Perhaps one reason for that is that it never actually went on the market - "our" agent showed it to us before the details were complete, so it never made it to Rightmove, so we never saw any misleadingly over-attractive photographs or hyped-up description. So we were't disappointed when we got there.
Of course we're not out of the woods yet; the various agents still have to get all the links of the (short) onward chain forged into some semblance of continuity, and it could all fall over at any time, so no celebrations yet. But it could happen...