At the start of this house hunting process I found it enjoyable, interesting, and maybe even a little bit refreshing - it can be fun to stick your head into a world you know little about and soak up all the new information.
That early gloss has well and truly worn off.
I frequently now feel like I’m going mad, have regular property-based dreams/nightmares, become enraged at abuses of the English language/postcodes/logic/standards of decency within the industry and generally despair at the thought of this process going on another minute!!
Anyone else feel the same? Anyone have any tricks for dealing with such symptoms, apart from the obvious?
Don’t let it get inside your head. Tell yourself this could take a couple of years and just go with the flow.
Better to take your time and find a house you really like than to grab a house (because you put a deadline on yourself) and have some sort of regrets over the next 30 years.
Well, I’ve got the t-shirt, too, and my advice would be to just buy the best house you can afford right now. We spend years looking for ‘the’ house and on reflection I’d rather have just settled the matter sooner than have spent all the time on the search. Somebody told me that the best time to buy a house is ‘when you need one’. Anyway, unless you get in way overhead you can just sell it again. We bought sensibly, could have spent twice what we did, but we’re happy knowing that we can always sell our house without suffering a loss. Once you stop viewing it as a life sentence it makes it a lot easier.
Started looking in 2010, sale agreed but I pulled out due to planning issues. Back renting. Been keeping an eye out the last two years, nothing I wanted came up in the location I wanted. Gave myself a deadline of May this year. New lease in a new house at very high rents but happy to leave the search behind again. Almost lowered my standards at the end.
If the right one comes along, I’ll break the lease. Vendors/EA’s have overpriced by 100k plus in my area at the moment in the higher end and that’s not factoring in the jumps we’ve had since 2010.
