Mummascribbles – It's our home-iversary – Mummascribbles

Today marks one whole year since we became homeowners. Something we never thought we’d become. 

I moved out of my parental home when I was about 22. I’d not long left uni and now looking back, I left way too early. Because I was paying full rent by myself, I was unable to save (ok, I might have bought a few handbags too!). I then moved to a flatshare with three others when I had to move out of the flat I lived in alone and following my new ownership of a kitten, me and the other girl I lived with moved into a flat by ourselves. We only stayed there for six months and then me and kitty went into another house-share for two years. It’s during this time that the other half and I got together and moved into our little one bedroom rented flat in East London. We lived there for three years and spent our first year and a half of Zach’s life there, squished into our little one bedroom. We knew at that point that we needed to move somewhere bigger and were preparing ourselves to move into another rented home as whilst we’d managed to save (the other half had some previous redundancy money sitting in an account), we still didn’t have enough for that huge deposit needed on our own place. 

Then the government brought in the help to buy scheme. 

Then our dreams became a little more of a reality but still we weren’t sure. 

So we went to see a mortgage advisor who asked us lots of questions, inputting the answers into her computer, and we soon found out the computer said yes!! We could get a mortgage. We could buy a house of our own! 

It still seemed like a dream. Even when we started shopping on rightmove. When we started going for viewings. When we started putting offers on houses. Not flats…proper houses with stairs and gardens. 

And then it all got a little disheartening when our offers were being rejected. We only had a very limited amount and we couldn’t afford to go into what was then the 3% stamp duty rate (I know it’s all changed now!). We also had two very select areas because of two reasons. One, the cost! It is almost impossible to buy anywhere in London so we knew we’d have to move outside but we also needed to be in close proximity to my mum who looks after Zach for us three days a weeks. 

The disheartening continued, house prices kept rising and we started thinking that maybe we’d have to start looking at flats instead. 

Then one Saturday came along and we had four viewings booked in. One cancelled so we ended up seeing three. 

We put an offer on two.

The first, as we were expecting, got rejected. It was at the upper end of our budget so we had no budging space. 

The second – we got a phone call whilst at a 1st birthday party. They were considering our offer (we’d gone in at asking price since we knew they’d already rejected a lower one), and the estate agent told us he’d have it wrapped up by the end of the day. 

We started to believe it could be happening. 

We got home from the party, the other half was on the phone to his mum telling her about the viewings when I got the phone call. 

Hello Miss Cornwell…

and after a brief how are you, how was your day…

I’m very pleased to tell you the offer has been accepted. 

Aaaaaaaaagh! We got a house! A proper house, below our maximum budget and it had stairs and a garden, on a quiet road but still close enough to a bunch of shops and train stations! 

I cried! 

I couldn’t believe the other half was on the bloody phone when we got the news. He came into the front room and I screamed at him…

WE GOT THE HOUSE!! 

It was the best feeling ever. Ok, maybe not as good as the feeling of seeing my newborn son for the first time but you know, bloody fantastic! 

Then came the long weeks of solicitors, banks, waiting for searches etc. We were lucky that there was absolutely no chain. Not our end and not the other end. It was as simple as it could have been for a house buying process. In all, it took roughly ten weeks. Our offer was accepted on the 1st February and we completed on the 17th April. 

It actually happened. That day was amazing although we ended up not getting the keys until very late that day because the previous owner wasn’t in a rush despite having a deadline! But we got the keys and the house was ours. 

When we arrived at the house, the tennant who lived with the owner was still moving his stuff out so it was a bit of an anticlimax! We waited for him to go and then we did the obligatory photo of us as a family of three opening the door to our first house.

  

Zach loved exploring what was a mansion compared to what we lived in before. It was wonderful and he and my nephew played together while me, my sister and the other half cleaned! The next day, we had a van booked to move all our belongings and luckily we had a two week overlap where we still had our flat so anything we didn’t have time to move, could be moved during those two weeks. 

And that was it. We were in. In our own house. 

   

   

It still feels like a bit of a dream now, even though we’ve been paying a mortgage for a year now. 

Buying a house is the reason I had to go back to work full time. I still struggle with the whole working full time thing but I have to remind myself that if it wasn’t for my full time wage, we wouldn’t have this house. Zach has his own room, he has a garden, there’s a school behind our house which we hope him to go to and he has space to run around (I’m finishing writing this on my phone in the garden with him!).

There’s a lot to do. We’ve decorated Zach’s room (you can see all about that here and here), but that’s about it. We need new front and back doors, we need to paint the other rooms and eventually buy new furniture. We can’t afford any of that at the moment but in time it will come. The doors are the priority but everything else can wait, no matter how much the magnolia walls annoy me! We have also tidied up the garden. When we first moved in it looked like this…

 

And it now looks like this…

 

Everything else can wait though because what’s important is that we have a roof over our heads that we are paying for. The money is going towards our own house rather than paying off someone else’s mortgage. Something we thought would never happen.

Happy home-iversary to us  

Tags: anniversary, house, buying a home