Deciding to buy

During 'The Rent Years' we'd inched our way out, as far as we could from Central London to be in with a chance of actually being able to afford somewhere, whilst not being so far out that we got slayed by the travelcard prices for the commute back in for work.

We had our first child (a boy) and had managed to get a place for him in a gem of a primary school. So, after another baby (a girl) and 7 years of paying someone else's mortgage we decided to set down some roots and get some more space.  It was time to take a leap of faith (my perception), take the plunge (my husband's perception) and get onto the property ladder.

Having spent the first (ahem) 30 years of my life in the North West I had to get over the property prices in the South.  My husband, having spend the first (cough, splutter) 28 years of his life in Lagos had to get over ... well quite a lot of things about living in the UK (who knew you'd have to pay income tax on your earnings??) and the price of property was certainly one of them.

So we researched, faffed about looking at houses on RightMove in our designated area (the primary school catchment) for a couple of months ... me making statements like "you could get a 5 bedroom detached house ... with grounds ... possibly stables for this much money in the North West" to which he'd counter "you could buy a plot of land, on the coast, hire yourself an architect to design your dream home with as many bedrooms as you wanted, a pool, a gym possibly a jetty out to the marina where we'd keep our speedboat, build it and still have change for a new Escalade".  He won that round.  We finally agreed to stay where we were.  House prices had bottomed out as much as we predicted (magic 8-ball) that they would and the decision was made.

The next set of challenges would be to
(a) be able to rally the money for mortgage deposit that seems to have increased ten-fold since I last bought a property 10 years ago in my singleton days
(b) convince a bank to lend us vast sums of money in an economic forecast that looked as promising as those dark grey clouds with the "not even a chance of a BBQ" thunder bolts that the weather forecasters so much like to use
(c) find a house that ticked all the boxes AND that we could afford