We’re not buying a house! Or rather, we’re not buying the house we thought we were.

The house, as I have mentioned before, is a bit of a wreck. I mean, it has walls and windows and a roof and stuff … but internal doors, floors and a working kitchen aren’t really included in the deal so it was always going to be expensive. We hadn’t banked on the boundary wall, a retaining one as the property is on a slope, being so neglected that the survey described it as “leaning severely” and “unsafe”.

These walls aren’t cheap and unfortunately we don’t have that kind of money lying around, this is our first house and by the time we’ve paid the deposit, the stamp duty and all the relevant fees, there’s not a lot left! We wanted the house but couldn’t take it under these circumstances so we did what we thought best – and asked the vendors to fix the wall.

Almost ten days later we have finally heard back to say they aren’t prepared to negotiate1 so we’ve retracted our offer. I’ll be booking some more house viewings for the weekend then ….

¹ Actually they were much ruder than that but never mind, it just served to show how much better off we are out of it!