"Further enquiries (3)". That was the subject line that landed at 6.12 this morning, and the three is the bit I don't like. I read it at the window of our flat with rain running down the glass above the shop below, and decided this was as good a moment as any to start writing things down.
I'm Chloe. I work in payroll, so my days are spent making sure other people's wages are right and my evenings making sure ours add up. My partner Matt teaches design and technology at a secondary school in the north of the city and owns more clamps than any one person needs. We've been together since 2018 and renting together since 2021, in a one-bed flat above a shop on Crookes' main road, for £725 a month.
The house, so far
On 21 September our offer was accepted on a 1930s end-of-terrace in Walkley, in the north-west corner of Sheffield. It's red brick, about 77 square metres, on a street so steep that I walked up it with my coat open in September and still arrived out of breath. There's a long narrow garden that climbs uphill in three stages from the back door, a box room that will become my office, and a peach bathroom suite that I'd guess is from about 1992. The asking price was £195,000. We offered £185,000, were politely turned down, and agreed £190,000. After the survey in October we asked for some money off, and on 8 November the price came down to £187,500. I took a screenshot of that email and have looked at it more often than I'd like to admit.
The man who owned it, Dennis, lived there for 45 years. He's in a care home in Hillsborough now, and his daughter Karen is selling the house for him under a lasting power of attorney. That's the kind part of the story and also the slow part, because every document has to be checked twice by people who are paid to be careful. It's why we're still answering enquiries in the middle of November, with a moving date nobody will promise us.
Why write it down
When we started looking in August, I went searching for real numbers. Not "five things every first-time buyer should know", but pounds: what a survey costs, what a conveyancer charges, how much cash has to be in the bank on the day, what the first year in an old house really costs. I found plenty of confident advice and hardly any receipts. A lot of it was written by people selling something, and the rest by people who bought in 2016 and have forgotten what it felt like.
So this is the receipts. I keep a tab in my budget spreadsheet called "house", where every pound we spend on the place gets a line, and I'll be sharing what's on it, including the things that went wrong. We're buying with a 90% mortgage, a deposit that's mostly a Lifetime ISA I opened in 2019, and no gifted money from anyone. The loan is about two and a half times what we earn between us. We're not rich and we're not struggling, and nothing about our situation is unusual, which is rather the point.
What to expect here
I'm not a mortgage adviser, a solicitor or a surveyor, and I'll say so whenever something needs one. What I can do is write down what we did and what it cost, as plainly as I can. Roughly, that means:
- The buying: the survey, the mortgage, the paperwork and the cash we need on the day.
- Moving in, and the bills that begin the minute you hold the keys.
- Repairs and renovation, with prices and the mistakes.
- DIY weekends, in which Matt cuts things and I paint them.
- Life in Walkley, which involves a lot of hill.
The name, if you were wondering, is the first two jobs on the list: collect the keys, put the kettle on. Everything else can wait until the kettle has boiled.
Matt has just read this over my shoulder and says I should add that he's very calm about all of it. He is currently sorting screws into jam jars by length, so I'm choosing to believe him. I'll write again when the enquiries come back.
