Ted Bruning on the trials and tribulations of putting his house on the market
It was when the estate agents started sending us particulars of our own house that we began to suspect their hearts weren’t in it any more.
Our house – Edwardian three-bed end of terrace in desirable Cambridgeshire village, all original features ripped out by 1970s philistines with a taste for fake stone fireplaces and orange-stained matchboard cladding – spent the whole of 2001 on the market, and we didn’t get a single offer. Nobody wanted to buy it for the same reason we wanted to sell it: it’s dark, awkwardly laid out, and it has no off-street parking.
We were seduced by the valuations various estate agents put on the house when we first decided to move. We were going to be rich!
Life isn’t like that, of course! We bought our house dirt cheap because it’s dark, awkwardly laid out and we weren’t dumb enough not to realise that if our house had gone up in value, so would anything we wanted to buy.
We needed to move because, with a growing family (not in number, but in the volume of personal possessions scattered randomly and everywhere) and me working from home a lot, we needed more space.
At first we were full of hope. We started looking for four-bedroom houses with drives and garages and made an offer – subject to selling our own house, of course – on the very first one we saw!
Then we waited for the flood of potential buyers. No-one came.
We changed agents and dropped the asking price by a few thousand quid. The new estate agent managed to push a few more people in our direction. You’ve probably all experienced that "what are they thinking?" anxiety when the agent is actually conducting a viewing.
We both work full-time, and neither of us are obsessively houseproud. Add to that Robert and Isobel’s miraculous ability to cover any given floor-space with objects and their equivalent inability to put them all back where they came from, and you can imagine the panic that ensued whenever the agent rang to say "I’ve got a couple who want to view – five minutes all right?"
A whole year of keeping the house nice – never again!
House-hunting was even more dispiriting. We soon realised we couldn’t afford anything nicer than we already had. The houses we saw that were bigger than ours were all either virtually derelict; or brand new and with loads of bedrooms not much bigger than a coffin.
So we took the house off the market, consoling ourselves with the fact that we paid so little for it that our mortgage repayments are still far less the rent we used to pay for the three-bed terrace house in north London we lived in eight years ago.
But the thought of our house’s inflated value won’t let go. You may say that it’s only really worth what somebody will pay for it; but that’s not entirely true. A higher valuation, however notional, means that we can borrow more, to pay for the repointing and double-glazing and damp-proofing the house so badly needs. We could even do a loft conversion and exile our children and their clutter to the attic.
So in a sense, we have found someone who’s prepared to offer what our house is supposedly worth. It’s us.
