This post is about a month overdue, but on December 12th, we moved house! It’s been a long process, and I wanted to write about our complete timeline for selling and buying a new house.
It’s been stressful, and we’re not moving ever again! There have been so many issues with our onward purchase and also our poor buyer sold her house to keep the chain in June and had to move twice due to issues in her temporary rental – honestly she was such a nice and patient person, you better believe we scrubbed the house for her, got a cleaner in to deep clean the bathrooms and left her some lovely gifts.
We are finally in our perfect home! There was a lot of cleaning to do, but we were just happy to get in before Christmas. I’m very sad to leave my Persimmon new build behind, though!
The stress of buying a new house
We thought it was going to fall apart about 100000 times. Our estate agents, Indigo Greens, were AMAZING with both our buyer and us. All solicitors in the chain were horrific at communication, especially when things became urgent and we needed prompt action, they were all MIA, working from home, on holiday, not contactable, or just replying with a couple of words to emails.
I feel like I’ve become an expert in the housing market, mortgages and conveyancing over the last year. I’ve spent a lot of time researching our issues regarding flooding and Land Registry. I cannot begin to tell you how nice it is not to be a slave to my emails. I was sick of feeling like I was waiting for a very important update, or could get some terrible news at any moment has caused me so much distress.
We lost a few thousand pounds on our failed purchase in June, of which you can read more about here.
We also almost got scammed due to Friday Afternoon Fraud!
There were times we thought we were at rock bottom, then something else could kick us in the teeth. We had the pressure of our buyer needing to be in as soon as possible, and our sellers trying to drag it out. We were just in the middle, hoping it wouldn’t fall apart.
The worst month of my life
October was one of the worst months of my life. Things went from bad to worse. We had just found out our seller had cancer and needed more time to process this, but then our buyer had been given notice on her temporary rental and needed to be out at the end of the month. Solicitors hadn’t passed on the correct enquiries, we had Land Registry issues, enquiries were not yet answered, and it felt like we were screaming into a void.
By the end of the month, we had somehow agreed to a completion date, so November felt easier, but as we got further into the month, it seemed like we were not going to complete on the 25th. Surprise, our sellers refused. We thought it was all over, but somehow, we managed to exchange contracts, and we could relax a little.
The packing and actual moving seemed like a walk in the park compared to the stress and worry we had been through!
Our house move timeline
- 10th January – Contacted Mortgage Advisor
- 26th January – Estate Agent Valuation
- 6th February – House on Market
- 27th March – Accepted an offer
- 29th March – Viewed House
- 30th March – Put in an offer
- 2nd April – Offer accepted
- 3rd April – Mortgage application submitted
- 15th April – Mortgage Accepted
- 18th May – Draft contracts
- 18th June – Pulled out as we discovered via Facebook it floods (saw photos from 3 different years of flooding around the house/garden/street, including people going by the house on a boat!)
- 29th June – Viewed House & Offered
- 2nd July – Viewed Another House, Offer was denied on 29th June house
- 6th July – Second Viewing And Offered
- 7th July – Offer Accepted
- 27th August – Sent Enquiries Off
- 1st October – Everything got bad for a long, long time, multiple issues
- 26th October – Agreed 25th November completion date
- 3rd November – 3rd viewing to measure up
- 18th November – 25th called off, the worst day of my life for stress
- 22nd November – Failed exchange
- 25th November – Exchanged contracts
- 12th December – Completed!!