Home Buyers Diaries #2: Gazumped & Heart Broken

I've banged on in about half a billion posts (like my last post and my rambling about being a grown up)  how Martin and I are looking for a house. Which is really cool and exciting and it is pretty much all I think about at the moment. So we found our dream home - a little "character cottage" with a huge stone wall, original fireplace and a cute little garden in my favourite village close to my parents home. 

They accepted our offer and we got a good price - yay! The estate agents rung us EVERY SINGLE DAY asking for updates that we gladly gave. Admittedly, we were slow throughout the process but it wasn't entirely our fault. Any other first time buyers (I hope) would agree it's such a stressful, confusing process, unless you're lucky enough to have a "hassle free mortgage" and have an easy time with a mortgage.

We struggled to get a mortgage because life hates us. But we managed it. We got our solicitor. We booked our surveys. We saved the money. We told our letting to start showing our flat again. We had our quotes for contents and building cover. We had made a list of all the furniture we were buying and had even picked the wallpaper. We were fucking ready.

But we had a phone call on Monday morning saying they had decided to start showing the house again, had put it back on the market and accepted another higher offer. This was after calling them from the mortgage advisors office on THURSDAY EVENING and telling them everything was good. That was our last hurdle and we were ready. "That's great" they told us. So we paid for our survey.

How, in the space of 2 days, can it go so downhill? How can they go from constant communication to conveniently not telling us they were accepting other offers. We would have matched the offer. We would have bought our completion date forward. We would have literally done anything they had asked, but the point is they didn't even fucking ask.

They call this gazumping. Which is a stupid name and I don't think it even begins to cover how heart shattering it is. But yeah, our almost first home is no more. Someone else is going to be living in it in a matter of weeks and it makes me feel sick with sadness.

BUT. It's so important to think that everything happens for a reason. Everyone was so nice on Twitter when I tweeted about the experience, and people said the same thing had happened to them before they found their dream house. I truly think everything happens for a reason, and I can only hope that come June/July, Martin and I will be sitting in our perfect house so relieved that this happened.