Just received confirmation from the bank yesterday that the wife and I's application for a loan to buy a house has been accepted, we just have to wait until the middle of next month (when she signs her permanent contract with her current employers) and we'll be able to get the ball rolling!
It's all gone very quickly, in the space of a few weeks we've gone from vaguely looking around without having a clue whether we could ever buy or not, to signing with the constructors and reserving the plot of land.
The houses are to be built in a new estate, when we began our enquiries there were only four left available, and when we visited a finished house to see what we thought, there was only one left. In the last couple of weeks we've reserved the remaining house, and once the monies are released, construction will begin!
These are the plans that we initially saw:
Ground floor:
First floor:
What I loved about the plans were that there was very little space lost. In the flat we current live in, there's a massive amount of corridor and wasted space, which I calculated to be almost 20 square metres. There is also a fourth bedroom, compared to the two we currently have (though we have a third as I put up a wall in the living room, cutting it in half so we had somewhere to sleep!).
With three kids, we'll finally have space to breathe!
Here's an artists impression of the finished build:
There will be another house on the garage side of the building, though there will actually be a small space between the two and no shared wall, so noise from the neighbours should not be an issue.
Here's the current plot of land as it is now!
I'll keep this thread updated with developments as we go along.
The red line is an effort to show the dividing line between the two future properties. The small size of the land is one of the reasons we were able to afford this at all!