In the beginning...

I haven’t actually said how the house came to be ours, because since buying it we have realised we got pretty lucky. So here’s a bit of background…

Since getting together in 2017, Jon and I talked quite a bit about buying a house together to do up. Jon was already in the middle of his first house project when I met him - converting a granny annex over a garage into a 2-bedroom/3 bathroom semi, with a high gloss spec (read – blingy!). He was targeting first time buyers who wanted a shiny, finished property. When I first visited, the shower was in the middle of what is now the lounge and I had to tread gingerly across dusty floorboards and hazardous exposed carpet grippers in order to use it (a taste of life to come).

Working on the house took up a lot of his spare time and ‘I’m working on the house’, became his most overused phrase. But he was still keen to do it all over again, as his share of any profits made when we sell would go towards his pension, which is basically shit if you’re self-employed.

Before Jon, I had arrived at the glum conclusion that I might never be able to afford a house in Bristol. Since moving back in 2016, I had succeeded in living in Clifton and Redland through some cheap rent deals, but these areas were way beyond my buying capability. Even the less desirable areas (St Pauls, Easton etc) were out of reach. The only houses that ever came up in my price range were complete wrecks, usually being sold at auction.

But now Jon was on board, these ‘wrecks’ became opportunities. We chose St George as it was as central as we could get within our price range, and also because I know lots of people that live there and they rave about it. We started viewing some options and through what can only be described as longstanding desperation, I became immediately attached to these car crashes. Luckily Jon could see they were completely unsuitable.

The first one we viewed I think I loved just because it was the first. It had even crazier 70s carpets and wallpaper than ours, and was blessed with big rooms. But it had a weird outhouse along the whole back of the house, which served no purpose and there was no space for a roof conversion. We looked at other finished properties on the same road and worked out that if we did it up, it wouldn’t sell for enough to cover the amount we would need to spend.

The second viewing was of a semi-detached, which immediately made it quite interesting, but it had so much subsidence we were worried we wouldn’t be able to get a mortgage. It was a tenanted property and when we went to look around it took them 15 minutes to answer the door (in the middle of the day), it was in a disgusting state and there was weed paraphernalia everywhere. The estate agent (typical slick salesman type) was obviously slightly embarrassed to have this house on his books and kept saying ‘we do have lots of nice finished houses you might be interested in instead’. Despite the subsidence I was still a bit disappointed we weren’t going for it, but when I tried looking for it online a few weeks ago to see how much it had sold for, it had been taken off the market, so definitely dodged a bullet there!

The third house, although at the very top of our budget, was just right (if you can call a house that needs to be completely gutted, new electrics and a damp course, ‘just right’!) Jon went to see it on his own first on the Friday, as I couldn’t get out of work. He apparently was sitting outside the house in his van waiting for his allotted viewing time, when he saw 2 men approach, who he correctly assumed were the owner and the estate agent. The owner was saying he wanted the ‘For Sale’ sign taken down (we found out later that it was his mother’s house and she had died a few months before, but because he lived nearby he just couldn’t face dealing with the attention the sign would bring). Jon leaned out and offered to lend them his snips and ended up chatting to them for about half an hour. The estate agent then said ‘are you ready to take a look inside?’, which surprised the owner as he had no idea that Jon was actually there to look round the house.

The next day, after Jon had let me know it all looked good from his perspective, I went round to see it for myself. I loved it, but was immediately despondent as there were already lots of people looking around. My friend Rachelle came with me as she only lives 5 minutes away. We chatted very loudly about the damp and undiagnosed hump in the floor, with the aim to plant a seed of doubt in the competition, but I really didn’t think we would stand a chance.

As soon as I left, I called Jon and we decided to put an offer in straight away for the asking price. He called the estate agents and they confirmed what we had thought i.e. that a number of people were expected to make offers over the next few days, so they would review and get back to us. I thought ‘well, that’s it then’ as we couldn’t up our offer and we knew that the house had such good potential it would definitely go above asking price.

15 minutes later I had a call from the estate agent. He had spoken to the seller and (against his advice – he had told the seller he could get more) he had accepted our offer! Apparently when Jon had put the offer in he had asked the estate agent to tell the seller that he was the guy he had met the day before who had lent him the snips and the seller said he would accept our offer. Clearly he was just keen to process everything as quickly as possible, to avoid the situation being even more long and drawn out.

We were ecstatic. And we have since had some estate agents come in to give advice on some of the things we were planning, and they have commented that we really got a good deal, so makes it even sweeter!