The most exciting thing to happen recently is that Babel and I are in the process of trying to buy a house

We’ve been thinking about moving in together for quite a long time, but it’s only over the course of the past few weeks that the discussions have really started to come to fruition.

The problem has always been where we are going to live, because I am from Birmingham and Tim is from Leicester. We have toyed with the idea of living in one place or the other at various points, but essentially I need to be near Birmingham for my job, and Tim needs to be near Leicester because he will hopefully be starting a PhD at the university there with effect from September. We thought about living in Hinckley, which is rather a pleasant place, but in the end dismissed it because the train connections aren’t good enough. Train connections are especially important to me because I don’t drive.

And so it was that in the end we hit upon the idea of living in Nuneaton. Nuneaton isn’t a place which either of us know much about – I had only ever been there once before we started looking at houses – but on paper it seems like the perfect location, situated directly between our two different home towns and with two trains an hour in either direction We spent a Saturday afternoon there one week before Easter and were able to ascertain that the town centre itself is very pleasant, albeit in a small sort of way, and if you’re not averse to gravel pits there isn’t really anything to object to.

That established, we started looking at places online and instantly discovered that our tastes in houses are somewhat different. I would be perfectly happy living in a two-up two-down terrace, which is what I grew up in, whereas Babel seems to require vast quantities of space I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the property prices in Nuneaton, which recession or not appear to be significantly lower than in Birmingham, with the result that we can actually hope to afford something more along the lines of what Babel wants.

Having got a feel for the area, we narrowed down the properties we were interested in, and Babel made appointments for us to go and see them. We saw three the weekend before last, but failed to agree on which one we thought was best. We saw another three last weekend, one of which was absolutely amazing, far in excess of the sort of house I ever thought we would be able to afford.

We spent most of last weekend reflecting on it and discussing it, trying to come up with some sort of negative points about it, but ultimately failed to find anything more significant than the fact that it has electric storage heaters rather than central heating. The result was that we made an appointment to go back to see it on Tuesday evening, following which we decided to make an offer. At £140k, the house is on the market for £10k more than we had originally intended to spend, the implication being that we need to increase our deposit by an extra £3k to ensure that we have 20% of the property value up front. After a bit of thought which was helped by the fact that Babel received an unexpected bonus from work, we decided that we could indeed manage it, and so it was all systems go

Babel rang the agent the next day to make the offer. After some unsuccessful attempts at negotiation the night before, we decided to offer the asking price, which was unsurprisingly accepted Our next step is to go and see the mortgage advisor and sort out an application for a real mortgage. As far as I understand at this point in time, Babel has managed to arrange that for Monday evening. It’s complicated somewhat by the fact that I will be working in Banbury It’s perfectly possible for me to leave the client at 5pm which means I can arrive in Birmingham at 18.18. Unfortunately the next train to Leicester leaves at 18.22 so it’s highly improbable I would be able to catch it. The following train doesn’t depart until 18.52, however, which is a bit of a pain and means I’ve got a lot of time to waste hanging around in New Street station and won’t get to Leicester until 19.50. But things could be worse, it could be an away job…

As to the house itself, I don’t want to say too much until I know whether or not we’re going to be able to get the mortgage. On the one hand, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be eligible for a mortgage but I’ve heard so many horror stories from colleagues recently about people getting turned down for the smallest reasons that I feel slightly worried about it. I was talking to someone yesterday who said she’d had to wait four weeks between making her mortgage application and getting confirmation that she would receive the loan, so it may be a long time until we know for sure what’s happening.

It’s all very exciting though. Very exciting indeed

Tags: houses

This entry was posted on Saturday, June 13th, 2009 at 1:20 pm and is filed under Random rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.