Landing

I allowed myself to wallow for a day or two - I’m a believer in letting myself feel what I feel and then letting it go. Letting it go came in shape of this email:

Hi Sketch,

I hope you're all having a great week so far. 

I hope you'll excuse this slightly random email, but sometimes it’s worth shouting out to the universe what you want as you never know what will happen.

Here goes!

We recently put forward an offer for the land for sale at xxxxx, but unfortunately, we were outbid (we believe) by a developer who went straight in at your asking price.

So, this quick note is to say that, in case the developer does what developers sometimes do, and try to string things out in hope of a cheeky price reduction further down the line, we just wanted to remind you that we’re here and still very much interested.

Please keep in touch.

Thank you and good luck!

Tope   

I pressed send, sent a prayer out to the universe and focused on finding us a home.

We very quickly found a three-bed house is Anerley, South East London. Although the location wasn’t our first choice the spaces this house offered, and the potential to evolve it in the future were exciting, so we put in an offer that was quickly accepted. YES!

We started the process of purchasing the home in Anerley (another thing I will post more about soon), mortgage, survey, solicitors etc and we were eyeing summer 2019 as our move date!

And then…

The universe responded. The Agent and Architect for the plot in Ladywell got in touch. The developer couldn’t get the numbers to ‘work’ so had pulled out (oh really!). Did we want to make another offer? (Errr, Yes!)…. But now we knew more. We went in with an offer significantly less than the original price (which we still believed was too high). And they accepted.

This left the ‘small’ issue of pulling out of the Anerley House. This was tough for me. I hated the thought of messing them about, and there was still huge risk with going down the home building route. Eventually, I sent them this note via our solicitor.

Our original plan was always to build our first home, however, when the land we found fell through we reverted to Plan B and found the xxxx property which we were really excited by. About 4 weeks ago, the original plot of land came back on the market and we have decided to follow our passion and build our own house. We're sorry for the inconvenience it will cause you and your family, and genuinely wish you the best of luck going forward.

Fast forward a crazy 12 months, and although we haven’t started building yet (more on that soon!), the plot is ours and we’re a huge step closer to building our first home.