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Our awesome powers of negotiation

Andrew and I know that we want to move. This house is just too small for us and my nesting instinct is going to make us both mad. (Not having a place to put my vaccuum cleaner drives me up the wall.)

Last week we found a house we quite liked in Peacehaven. It had 5 bedrooms, 3 full baths and one loo. It also needed loads of TLC, but it all seemed decorative. It was on the market for £235,000 but Andrew and I felt that was a bit much considering it was a mid-terrace with the amount of work required. We decided it would be worth seeing what else was out there before we made our mind up.

On Friday I booked us in to see a property also in Peacehaven. We absolutely fell in LOVE with it! I would have put in an offer there and then if my brain didn’t kick in. It was the kind of house we walked into and were wowed from the beginning… you could just really see yourself living there, you know?

(Details can be found here. It doesn’t look like much from the outside, though! BTW — the door on the left is the front door, the door on the right leads straight into the utility room.)

In short — it’s “only” 4 bedrooms, 1 bathroom and 1 loo — but it has SO much more to offer. Firstly, it comes with a huge lounge-dinner (whereas the other house only had one reception room and it was quite pokey). It also has a separate utility room, double depth garage, lovely large garden, off-road parking and it’s a semi-detached. Oh yeah — and it has the biggest master bedroom I have ever seen… even by American standards. (The Biermann house excluded, obviously.) Plus, it’s in a good enough decorative order we could just move right in… very handy with the baby on the way!

It’s on the market for £268,000 and we made an offer of £260,000. They came back and said no. 🙁 I later phoned the estate agent to see if they had mentioned any sort of figure they were looking for. He said that they hadn’t, but they had only just lowered the price from £279,000. Taking that into account, we offered £264,000 to “meet them in the middle” between our initial offer of £260k and the asking price of £268k. We’ll find out tomorrow — so please keep your fingers crossed!!!

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3 responses to “Our awesome powers of negotiation”

  1. Erica Avatar
    Erica

    Now that I’m done with the heaps of good luck we just got from The Housing Fairies, I will pass it all on to you! My fingers ARE crossed and I hope they take your offer and don’t come up with any ridiculous counter-bids!! It sounds fabulous and charming – you must get it!

  2. Erica Avatar
    Erica

    Oh, and also? That kitchen is FABU! All that workspace? All the cabinets? It’s wonderful! And I will never get over the washing machine being under the sink in the kitchen. That seems so weird to me! It’s not, I know, but…it’s those spoiled American ideals.

  3. Andy Avatar
    Andy

    I know what you mean about the washing machine… Even though I don’t really care if it’s in the kitchen or not (I am British, after all), I so see the benefit of having it in the basement (another seemingly unheard of thing over here, damn it!) or in an actual laundry/utility area. I don’t know.. Those crazy Brits!

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