Your baby is ugly!

The day has arrived. You’ve done the dance with all the other suitors, seen a lot of frogs, watched people steal away what you felt was rightfully yours (howiya Sarah!), and been stood up and left crying in the rain (ok possibly an unnecessary metaphor, but for the drama it’s staying in).
It’s happened, you’ve finally found ‘the one’ – and you’ve gone SALE AGREED.

It’s at this moment, reality bites. This is real.
Money is going to start leaving your account…and fast.

So I’m going to let you in on a little secret; I had some help in the initiation process for
The First Time Buyer’s Club. I’d consider myself a fairly smart person (what?) but this is handing over the best part of €300k for the next 30 years, not just deciding if you want plain cheese or bacon & cheese fries from Eddie Rockets at 2am you know (always bacon & cheese though, right?) This was big, the biggest in fact. So I brought in the experts.

Now I’m not being paid to say this (my blog is only a few weeks old sure, hardly Pippa O’Connor! hey @pipsypie) so I say this only because it’s true; I could not have got through the last couple of months without the amazing Gerry Hiney and his team over
at Park Financial. I went to them as soon as I had my deposit, and to get the original mortgage offer they submitted all my paperwork to the various banks.
Eh, hello, the dream!
And once I found my little gem of a gaff, Gerry talked me through each of the offers on the table (I’ll do a bit about why I chose Permanent TSB in another post) Anyway, there was not a question Gerry couldn’t answer nor a problem he didn’t offer a solution for.
I won’t gush on about them, but if you’re at the start of your process, give these guys a buzz. Genuine ledgebags.

So first, the holding deposit  – this was 5,000 smackers and needed to be paid to the Auctioneer the day I went sale agreed. I got a bit of a fright when this was asked for, nobody had really mentioned this was the norm, but all was cool. It’s totally refundable and if something, god forbid, does go wrong with the sale, you’ll get it back.
So if you’ve found ‘the one’, stick that €5k down.

Next up, the bank’s valuation. The bank basically needs to know that the house is worth what they’re going to lend you. Makes sense right! You’ll need to pay for this valuation, ‘that’ll be €150, please’. Once all is sound, things can start moving.

Then comes the beast; the structural survey. This is the bad boy that separates the women from the men (see what I did there! #whatwouldBeyoncedo)
Now, before I scare the living shite out of you, the reason I had issues with my survey is down to the fact that I decided nothing other than a 100 year old hipster artisan cottage with original features (yes, that’s how I explain it when people say – ooh what did you buy? I don’t care.) was going to be good enough for me – so yes, I kind of brought it on myself.

Now I’ve watched enough episodes of Location, Property Ladder, Houses Under the jaysus Hammer – all of them, millions of times. I know what a sh*t hole looks like. My new love was not a sh*t hole, but my god did I get a fright when the report came back.
Imagine someone scanning every single inch of your body and telling you exactly what was right and wrong with it, I mean it just hurts. Other than that the only thing I can compare it to, is someone telling you your baby is ugly….over and over again, over 23 pages.

So in the next post I’m going to bring you through the process that happens to your new love, the scrutiny, the fault finding and public shaming (again, it’s staying for the drama).

Grab a blanky ladies and gents, cause sometimes the truth hurts!