A house!

And just like that, we're back to March. We had secured our buyers, insofar as one can 'secure' people, filled in enough paperwork to account for a small wood at least,  and arranged for gas and electric safety checks, which we knew would be required by the buyers' solicitor.

Now, all we had to do was find ourselves a house and hey presto! after many hours of searching, we found one, for which we duly submitted an offer and after surprisingly little arm wrestling, a mutually acceptable offer was agreed upon and we proceeded to shell out a wad of the folding stuff for our  survey, officially known as a RICS level two homebuyer's report.

On the positive side, although it's pretty expensive, the homebuyer's report is also pretty extensive and in these modern days of email, sees the light of day quite quickly.

That's the positive aspect and it was certainly very clear, should we ever have doubted it, that it is an essential requirement for anyone serious about buying a property. There is a more expensive alternative available which is usually recommended for old houses, but the one we were interested in was only built in the eighties (No, that's not old!) so we went for the level two.

Well, I can't argue that it was indeed money well spent, but not in a good way. 

Unfortunately, the surveyor had found several problems with the property, some of which seemed to be as a result of DIY done by the wrong people with the wrong materials and which would be expensive, time consuming and inconvenient to put right. 

As we had promised ourselves that we did not want a house which needed work, beyond the usual cosmetic and decorating jobs, this was not going to work for us.

I rang the estate agent and explained.

"Oh yes, of course, I quite understand," was the response, followed by "Do you think you could send us a copy of your report so that we can see what we're dealing with?"

The answer to that, I'm afraid, was a resounding no, unless they were willing to reimburse us for the approximately £500 we had spent on it. 

And no, I didn't actually say that. I did email a few of the summary points to give an idea of the problem and didn't even get an acknowledgement.

From trawling through the internet, it seems that once a problematic report has been produced, the sellers/estate agents are obliged to come clean about it, if asked. So maybe that's something to be aware of when house hunting.

However, although we had avoided a pothole in the house hunting road, we were now back to searching again and hoping that our buyers were willing to be patient.