The Road to Walthamstow

We original wanted to live in Brighton, As I think a lot of people do. But in the end we found the prices very high and were worried about the journey (cost and time).
So we decided that Walthamstow was the place to be, It was cheap (relatively), we knew people who lived there and loved it and it's quick and easy to get into central London.
We spent about 6 month searching and found a few houses that were OK, a couple were great but out of our price range and a lot that seemed small and expensive.
In fact they seemed to be getting more and more expensive as time passed, our budget had gone from £250,000 to £300,000 and we were in danger of being priced out of the area completely.
Eventually were found our house, it was big, had a good feeling about it and was just in our price range, also it was cheaper because it needed a lot of work. I have always fancied a project (I love Grand Designs and always fancied being an architect when I was younger), so we went for it.
We put an offer in for £300,000, got pushed up to £308, then to £310, we were the highest bidder, Hooray.
But the seller wanted more, so annoyingly did a closed bid to push the price up, even though we were the highest. So we decided to go for £316,000 to make sure we would get it, and we did. Hooray again.
Now we just had to get the bank to up the mortgage!

Moving to Walthamstow

I have created this blog because when we were buying our house it was all very confusing, we weren't sure what we were doing and spent hours searching the internet trying to find out what we were supposed to be doing at any given point.
Hopefully this blog will set out the whole process of finding a house, getting a mortgage, buying and the trials a tribulation of renovating a clapped out house in E17.
Some things we will do wrong, some we will do right.
I hope it will help in some way to see what happened to us.