In the days leading up to my first property viewing evenings were spent looking at the same picture real over and over again until I nearly convinced myself I actually lived there. In what can only be described as mildly sociopathic, I scrutinised the property listing to deduce that the current owners were recently married with a small child (male) and the move must be linked to that. Careful study of the photos did however bring up other issues. My parents had also spotted something which had the potential to be much more damning; surface wiring.

I’d heard of surface wiring before. I knew it was something typically found in older buildings and it was a nightmare to sort out. (Remember the antidote on Warwick Castle and scrambling around floorboards? That was Dad rewiring a bungalow.) What I didn’t know however was how much it would cost to rectify. “Thousands” my Dad said bluntly, an opinion very much concurred by Mum. “It’ll cost you thousands to fix and you’ll never see the benefits” she said.

The three of us did everything to try and get a better look on the wiring, but the magnolia walls and grainy indoor photos made it virtually impossible to establish the presence of surface wiring. In the end we agreed to go through with the viewing anyway. The house was nicely presented in the photos, it was possible that the owners had already had the work done as part of redecorations.

On the day there was mild trepidation on my part. Yes, I was viewing a house, but what kind of house? There is something very different about viewing month-old still shots of a clean house compared to walking through an active family property in the here and now. The weather did nothing to assist with my spirits; on that particular Monday lunchtime it was chucking it down. Dashing to get work completed in the office my phone started pinging incessantly in a manner associated with only one person.

“Yes, yes Mum, I’m coming out now,” I grumbled as I tugged on my coat and walked past my professional colleagues. A sprint to the parked car outside and a speedy drive took me to the property in question, a Victorian mid terrace house.

I suppose the signs were never great to start with, it poured with rain that lunchtime. All three of us sat in Mum’s tiny Toyota IQ waiting for either the rain to clear or the estate agent to show up (whichever came first). As the appointment time came and went I sighed under my breath. As the viewing had been conveniently scheduled by my property agent to coincide with my lunch, every minute I went over my allotted hour was another minute I’d have to work overtime to compensate. After what felt like an age in that small car the agent appeared and the rain paused just long enough to get inside.

Dad had planned a few choice questions to ask the agent prior to the viewing. Questions linked to the electrics, the wiring and the attic space. Mum wanted to probe into the circumstances of the sale. The property had been on the market for a short while now, was there any room for negotiation on the price? I was there to see if fundamentally I wanted to live there and quietly ask questions to Mum when the agent was out of the room. If I’d learnt one thing over my many years of property involvement it was this; never, ever trust the word of the estate agent.

Our hopes were quickly dashed when we entered the property to see the vendor sat quite contently on the sofa with a baby on her knee. She smiled politely and greeted us, the baby likewise. Already we could see a probable reason why the property was still on the market, they had done this all before. We reciprocated and commenced our viewing. If the awkwardness of the vendor didn’t make things off putting, then the attitude of the estate agent certainly didn’t help. During the whole visit he was difficult and mildly unpleasant, it was as if he was irritated that the three of us had common sense. When the inevitable subject of surface wiring came up early on (which, we discovered, DID exist) the agent flippantly suggested it would only cost “a couple of hundred” to resolve. Dad, with his previous experience of rewiring a property, had little faith in the white-collar quote. “It’ll cost more than that” came the blunt response. Stood between two very differing opinions, I could sense the tension that usually preceded a Victorian street brawl. I moved swiftly into a room where Big Brother and its baby wasn’t present.

Where does one begin with the faults of that house?

To start with, the supposedly pristine kitchen had whacking chunks missing from the cupboards and the floor had stiletto-shaped holes in it. It was if a glammed-up Bull Terrier had gone through a Saturday night stint in the small space. Adjoining this was the one singular bathroom of the house. In the photos the bathroom looked like had been recently refitted, nicely done out to a high spec. Unfortunately, in the same way the camera supposedly adds pounds onto models, the camera had very much over promised on the offering in this room. We stood in dismay at the sight of broken wall tiles and the scruffy shower door swinging over a ‘well-loved’ bath. Climbing up the narrow stair case (the type one has to walk up sideways like an awkward crab), we walked across the landing and entered into what was the second bedroom. In amongst the piles of clothes and discarded children toys we could hear the loud banging and drilling of an engineer installing a new boiler in place. This was the boiler that the agent had boosted about in previous communication. It was also the new boiler that had caused the house price to increase by £5,000 overnight.

“Did she ask you to put the boiler there?” Dad called over the mess. Sandwiched between the bed and a pile of outgrown baby clothes, the engineer took a brief rest bite from his work.

“Yep. I would have installed elsewhere personally,” he shrugged, “but she insisted.”

Dad shuffled out to enable myself and then Mum to see the room. Who knew surprises lay beneath the raised clothes carpet, although even with all the junk removed I argued that as second bedrooms go it would still be a small room.

Like bedroom two, bedroom three had also been omitted from the listing photography of the house. A child’s bedroom, it naturally was also the smallest of the three in the property. A quick look around and, surprisingly, all seemed in adequate order (aside from the ‘stuck on’ looking plug attached to the sideboard. By this point though dodgy looking plug sockets had become water off a duck’s back to me). The rain having stopped, the three of us could look out over the garden from the small sash window. From a source above water was dripping down the pane in large blobs.

“That’s a bit suspicious,” Mum observed.

“Forget that, look at the wall!” I pointed to the wall of the second bedroom, visible from the indented third room.

A massive crack stretched right across the exterior wall, a diagonal split that in the dull November weather looked as menacing as it did damaging. Knowing that the crack would still be there in five minutes (and if not, the engineer would be the first to suffer the consequences), our little trio moved on. The agent meanwhile, clearly having written us off as serious contenders, only started to amble up the stairs as we entered the third and master bedroom.

By this point I don’t know what I was expecting the last bedroom to provide. A bit of normality I guess? Just a single space where there were no hidden horrors or things that needed urgent attention. I stepped into the bedroom and laughed. Put it down to insanity or the actual hilarity of what I was looking at, but I couldn’t help myself exclaiming my observation for all to hear.

“That radiator is wonky!”

The final blow had been cast. Disbelieving it for herself, Mum walked over to the piece of old plumbing to check. The secondary opinion came in, the radiator was, indeed, crooked. The estate agent started bleating that straitening the radiator would be a quick and easy job to do, that it was not an unusual feature of period properties. Our trio had long since stopped listening to the advice of the suited bald man, we scuffled across the tattered carpet and exited the room without even acknowledging his opinions. At the bottom of the stairs we bumped into the engineer again.

“Have you seen the crack on the exterior wall of that bedroom?” Dad muttered.

The engineer exchanged us with a knowing look, the classic look of a tradesman who wasn’t born yesterday.

“Yeah, it’s a mess. I wouldn’t want to sleep in that room,” he gruffly responded, before slipping out of the front door onto his next job.

We briefly popped outside to the back garden, more than anything to get away from the all-hearing estate agent and to participate in the unique British need to congregate and exchange negative comments about other people’s houses. Half of the guttering was missing, leaving a streak of mould down the second bedroom wall, but that felt old hat now. Give us something new. The rear parking was so far up a back-end dirt track that to get a car up there would be virtually impossible. Pfft, so what? Another stick in the fire. As we walked back up the crumbling garden path I cast a brief look at the neighbouring garden. With long overgrown grass, a knocked over fence, and disintegrating garden toys lying about haphazardly I whispered to Mum, “the garden next door looks rough.” I didn’t much fancy angering the neighbours.  

From the dirty grout in the bathroom, to the rough looking garden next door (which, we were reassured a few too many times by the vendor, belonged to “lovely neighbours”), the three of us knew this period property wasn’t ‘the one’. Other than the mild humour that came when Dad realised he wasn’t going to fit through the Jimmy Crankie attic hatch, the level of investment required by this house was farcical. Two words; money pit.

Maybe this house was destined for someone more naïve or for first time buyers who wanted a long-term project, but someone that was not me. A feeling reciprocated by the agent, he shut the door firmly behind us as we walked out, leaving him, vendor and a crying infant inside.

“Is he going to come out?” I cautiously asked.

“Must be talking to the seller.” Mum replied.

“Perhaps he’s telling her she’s a fantasist to ask that much when there’s so much to do.” I mused.

“Maybe. At any rate, I’ve never experienced an estate agent like it. He seemed so nice and, well, typically estate agenty on the phone. Remember him Alice, you’ll never experience an agent like that ever again.”

From the house we ambled over to a local coffee shop where we sat and discussed the house we’d just viewed. Well, when I say discussed I mean we basically had a massive slating off session as we tore apart every single element of the past forty give minutes. Mum and Dad had travelled some distance to attend this viewing while I only had a five-minute walk back to the office. Waving them off I felt a pang of guilt that they’d travelled some way to see a duff house. However we all agreed that the house was in no way a goer, to the point where Dad said he’d step in if I even vaguely suggested putting an offer on it.

Two days later the estate agent contacted Mum with a markedly different attitude. With a friendlier tone, he accepted our points about the surface wiring and general state of the property.

“I have told her she needs to drop the price, but she’s set on getting higher than the market valuation. It doesn’t help that she seems in no rush to move. Her partner is currently working in North Devon but she doesn’t want to let the place go.”

Mum left the agent with a simple and clear message “fine, good luck to her with that.”

So this particular house was a no, but I refused to be downbeat about the whole experience. My first property visit had been an eye opener and educational to say the least. There would be other houses to view in the future and I there would be many more rejections before I found ‘the one’. The property search would continue on.

 

This post is part of “The First Time Buyer Diaries”. To read the entire series (so far) click here.