On Wednesday 29th July we finally completed on the sale and purchase of our old and new houses. It took a little over six months to get everything sorted. Selling our house happened extremely quickly but the purchase was very complicated because it wasn’t mortgagable in a normal sense.

The previous owners had legally made it two leaseholds (with the Land Registry) but there was no planning and the conversion was so bad that any mortgage company that looked at the house could see they weren’t separate enough that they’d accept the risk.

We spent a while getting gaslighted by the estate agents and sellers that the problem was our financial situation or that it was the banks we were trying, but they eventually conceeded the problem was with the property. We went via a specialist broker and found a building society that specialises in tricky properties to mortgage it, they were slow but they did come through in the end.

All of this took months, multiple surveys and valuations and a lot of to-and-fro. Our buyers were very patient throughout luckily. It all went right down to the wire because our vendors were very disorganised despite having plenty of notice of the completion date and in the end, we exchanged less than 24 hours before we completed which was quite stressful.

The move itself was pretty smooth we had help from a removals company and we cleaned the old house and cycled the three minutes to the new place.

We’ve had the house for two weeks now but have yet to stay overnight, we’ve been stripping out old carpets, wallpaper and one of the kitchens. We’re working from the living room in the day which is the most normal room and then cycling back to Bec’s sister’s place to stay with them.

On the day we completed we submitted for planning to amalgamate it back to one house, it will take two months to get an answer. There’s no reason for them to say no but you never know I guess. So in the meantime we’ll keep it separate and are preparing each one without removing the dividing wall.

We’re talking with our architect Ulf and some consultants on how to get the ball rolling with the EnerPHit renovation.