Renovation Column: The property buying/selling process turned me into a psychopath

Patience has never been my strong suit but I went into this process expecting delays, limbering up to jump through hoops and preparing Jedi mind tricks to karate chop through red tape like a ninja.

Despite all my preparation and good intention I failed at the first hurdle - the house buying/selling process itself.

For starters nobody tells you that when you’re buying a property from the church you have to wait for monthly board meetings of the diocese to get anything signed off.

Then there’s solicitors to factor in and If anyone has seen the film Zootropolis I can only compare the work of our solicitors and that of our buyers to Flash the sloth. Days turned into weeks, weeks turned into months and I was left questioning how these firms stay in business. I was still musing over this when our solicitors bill demanding thousands turned up.

All this stress running alongside a process where anyone can pull out of a house sale at any moment (this happened to us with two buyers). In fact we were forced into a situation where we had to exchange and complete on the same day and genuinely didn’t know if things would go ahead until we received the keys to the vicarage at 4pm that day.

The whole property buying and selling process in England feels like a high stakes game of Jenga that could crumble to the ground at any given moment. The system is so out of touch and I was left considering if it was an over reaction to move my family to Scotland or Australia where, once you have agreed to buy a house, you actually have to follow through or face a financial penalty.

The saga turned me into some kind of psychopath with stalker-like tendencies. I would ring solicitors and estate agents as soon as their offices opened and multiple times (from multiple phone numbers) throughout the day. If someone was unavailable it was because they were avoiding my calls and I would make everyone’s life in the office a misery with my persistence until I tracked them down. It took everything I had not to dress in a trench coat and sunglasses and hide in my car eating donuts like a washed up American PI ready to prove that person was not in fact on a lunch break.

It was only when I crashed my car into a car park post after failing to concentrate because I’d just found out sale had fallen through for the second time that I decided things had to change. It was time to mentally check out from the process before mentally checking in to some kind of asylum. It would seem the uncertainty of not knowing where you are going to live with two kids in tow and dealing with a property process that seems like it’s setting you up to fail is enough to tip you over the edge.

Surely once we’d moved in the delays and uncertainty would diminish….Oh how I laugh now at my naivety.

Keep up to date with all the progress and find out more by following @ohgodweboughtavicarage on Instagram