If you follow me on instagram (which you should) you’ll know that I am now a homeowner (it still feels weird and unbelievable to write those words). But I haven’t written my thoughts and feelings about the whole process up here on my blog – and those of you who only follow along on this space may have missed out on it entirely!
I’m still quite tense about it all, and I think, in all honesty, I’ll continue to be tense and on edge until I apply for my Indefinite Leave to Remain visa this time next month. As this whole process was ongoing, in the back of my mind I kept thinking “but why are we working so hard on a home that the UK can potentially kick me out of this summer?”. Sam always tells me I need to think more positively and if we had passed this house in York up to await me finally getting ILR we may never have been able to afford a home on York. Which I will elaborate on further.
The House Finding Process:
Around this time last year we started looking at houses. Our budget was reasonably tight, and now that we know York pretty well, our budget didn’t afford us anything in an area that a) we liked or b) within a walking distance of the city centre. There were a few things in York in our price range but they were in pretty far out suburbs that just weren’t right for us. So we started looking outside York.
We fell for this teeny, tiny cottage in a village outside of York last August and we put an offer in. In the end, the owner decided she wasn’t going to sell. And that was it. It was the only village we could really afford to buy in outside of York so we immediately had to open our search to be a lot more broad. We ended up gravitating towards West Yorkshire, not for love of the area, but for price. We looked at a lot of properties in Hebden Bridge, Halifax, Sowerby Bridge, etc: we ended up viewing pretty much the whole Calder Valley. We saw a lot of things we hated; and the properties that we did like, mostly in Hebden Bridge were just slightly out of our budget. By this point in time it is now October and we’ve seen 20 or so houses and we are pretty resigned to renting for the rest of our days.
I spent an hour every evening on Zoopla and Rightmove and one night I spotted a house in York in our budget. And not only was it in our budget but it was in the same area we lived in now. An area that we love. And it was only one street over from where Sam’s brother lived. We got on the phone with the estate agent and we saw it the day after it had been listed. We were the first people to see it and we made an offer that day. The seller held out and waited for a few more people to view it and in the end, took our offer at asking price in November.
It was the same set up as the house we were renting: a cute little 2 up, 2 down Victorian-terraced house with a little garden. Everything else on the street was going for 30-50K more than what this house was on for. And that’s because the house was a mess. A horrendous, horrible mess. I honestly think that we got the property because few people had the vision to see past all the awfulness.
The biggest culprit was damp. The house was about 50 years out of date for a course of damp-proofing and the damp and mildew had gotten into the walls so badly that all the plaster was sliding off the walls. In some places the walls were at 30 degree angles it was so wet. In the kitchen there was black lino that had massive holes ripped in it; the bathroom hadn’t been touched since the 70s; the master bedroom was lovely with its original floors and it just needed a lick of paint; the spare room had a fire hazard of painted-over polystyrene ceiling tiles, green shag and yellow paint; the stairs were similarly carpeted and painted.
But we still knew it was the one for us.
The Buying Process:
One of our biggest motivators for leaving London in 2016 is that we knew we’d never get on the property ladder if we stayed and we’d certainly never get a deposit together. (And we didn’t have family to help us out with it.) But in York we were able to. Critics of York talk about how expensive it is, and it is the most expensive city in the North, but for our 2 bedroom house in the most-sought after area of York, we were paying several hundred less per month in rent versus our one bed flat above a pub in Crystal Palace. (And Crystal Palace was not the happening place that it is now when we first moved there in 2012.)
We realised that we were in quite a good position with the seller as the condition of the house was scaring other people off so we negotiated that we would either lower our offer or she would have to pay for the damp repair work out of her pocket. At this point in time we’d already had the inspection and knew that realistically we couldn’t pay both the deposit and the damp-proof work. The seller agreed to pay for the work as soon as contracts had been signed which just left us to finalise our mortgage.
By this point in time it was now mid-February because all the inspections moved really slowly over the holidays. And the house had such repair issues that the original inspector wanted a structural engineer to take a look at one of the walls (luckily everything was okay). As first-time buyers the mortgage process was intimidating and sickening, but fairly straight forward. The biggest complication for us was that most banks won’t take a risk and give a mortgage to a visa national. We had to meet with several companies before we found one that would talk me on my current immigration status. The paperwork was signed, the solicitors were now doing their things and the house was soon to be ours.
Sort of. It took the solicitors weeks and weeks to do their thing. Our exchange date was finally set. The beginning of May (our house offer had been accepted back in November.)
House reno:
We’d all arranged for the damp-proofing to start the day we got our keys. Everything downstairs was being stripped back to the brick work and eventually re-plastered by a team of damp specialists whilst Sam and I got to work elsewhere.
The first thing that needed to come down was the polystyrene tiles from the bedroom since they were a hazard. It was an easy enough task to do by ourselves, though our arms did get tired from being over our heads for so long.
Then came stripping off 100 years of wallpaper from around the house. It was the most tedious and irritating task. We bought a wallpaper steamer for £25 and it was worth every penny. Friends don’t let friends put up wallpaper. Enough said about that.
Then we pulled up the carpet on the stairs and spare room to find, to our delight, the original floors underneath. We sanded and refinished the floor in the spare room, and painted the stairs. Then we painted the entire upstairs.
We pulled up the lino in the kitchen since it was shredded to bits in places and discovered the house’s original kitchen tiles underneath. 95% of the tiles are in awesome shape, but we are missing a few in the doorway to the living room so we are still trying to decide what to do about them. We repainted the bathroom, I took the old knackered back-splash tiles down from the kitchen and re-plastered that wall. We also took the doors off our kitchen unit and painted the units white. In the garden, the vast majority of the space was taken up by a rotten shed so we pulled that down, scrubbed away 20 years worth of moss and hung some flowers.
Because of the damp work, we weren’t able to paint the downstairs until 6 weeks after the work had finished so we only recently painted. It was annoying having to paint after we’d already moved in but completely doable.
There’s a lot of work left to go, but everything left are things that we want to save up for years down the line: some exciting things like completely re-doing the bathroom, all the floors downstairs, new kitchen units, backsplash and sink, new front and back doors; and some boring but necessary things, like a new roof sometime in the next ten years and a new boiler. But all in all it’s in so much better of a state and I can’t wait to feel entirely settled in to our little home. And I never really want to move again!
I’ve included below some before, during and after photos. And to be completely honest, my before photos are flattering. It was actually in a much worse state before!
Living Room Before:
Living room work in progress
Living room after:
Kitchen Before:
Kitchen After:
Bathroom Before:
Bathroom After:
Stairs Before:
Stairs After:
Spare Room Before:
Spare Room in Progress:
Spare Room After:
Master Bedroom Before:
Master Bedroom After:
We’ve done a lot of work and we obviously have a lot more to go, but we are at a place were we can happily live here and save up for the future.
