One Year Later

In July 2015, Chris and I finally flew the nest and bought our first home. In January 2015 we finally decided we were ready to move out of my parents house and started looking for our own place. House hunting was good fun, especially as we saw some pretty awful places that fitted into our budget. My favourite was a house that needed about everything fixing and overlooked a graveyard, hmm maybe not. In the end we found a couple of places we liked, but we kept getting beaten to the sale by cash buyers, it did get a little frustrating.

In the end I started being friendly with some estate agents, and one of them let me know about this flat that had go on the market that day, that was in our budget but it wasn’t exactly what we were looking for. It was in a completely different area to where we were looking to buy, and it only had one bedroom rather than the two we were hoping for. Regardless of this the estate agent promised me we wouldn’t be disappointed if we went for a viewing, so that evening we went and had a look, and we put an offer in there and then.  

The flat was perfect, it needed absolutely no work doing to it, and although it was a few years old it still looked brand new. I was originally put off on the fact it was a one bedroom, but it was huge, so much bigger than any of the two bedroom flats we had seen previously. The owner was asking for a very fair price, so we offered them the full asking price and as we lived at my parents house we could move things along very quickly. The next morning it was confirmed that our offer had been accepted, and we were going to be homeowners, and everything would be done within six weeks. Apart from it wasn’t. 

It’s no joke when someone says buying a house is the most stressful thing you can go through. The whole process took us about 5 months to finally exchange on our flat and move in, which probably doesn’t seem long, but when the owner wanted a quick sale and you were promised 6 weeks, it feels like a very long time. Turns out we hired the worst solicitor ever, who didn’t like to do much, and even after we moved in still took a year to tell the company who owned our flat that we lived there, yay. But hey ho, in July 2015 we finally moved in and could start our little life together. 

Homeowning has been fun, but also difficult at times. Chris and I are both on low salaries, and so once the bills are paid there’s not much money left over. It’s not the end of the world, but it’s been an adjustment we’ve had to make. Gone are the days of going out all the time, and now spend a lot more time at home, or inviting people over to ours for social events. But I love finally being able to live with Chris. We’d been together a very long time before we could live together, and many of those years were either spent at university or living at opposite ends of the country, so being able to live in the same space as him is great. I really can’t explain how amazing it is to finally live together, but we have so much fun together, and he somehow puts up with me adopting two cats to share the flat with us. 

Owning our own space though is amazing, we have the freedom to do what we like to our flat which you might not get if you rent, as well as our monthly mortgage cost being half the cost if we were renting the same flat in our building, crazy. That year we spent living at my parents, although stressful at times, was completely worth it to be able to buy somewhere. Yes it’s small, and not the house we originally wanted, and we still haven’t finished decorating, but it’s a start on the ladder and I wouldn’t change a thing.