Is it the end of the dream?

We decided that we would have one major attempt to sell our house. We dropped the price, we retiled the kitchen, we had a new lounge fire fitted and we spent £3500 on some new windows. More viewings took place with some interest but no firm offers.

Then came the next bombshell about a month after our sale fell through the church estate agents rang to say that the sellers could wait no more and another buyer had put an offer in and that they had no option but to accept it. It really was the end of the dream. The church was gone. Well at least we had our new windows and fire i suppose.

But by now we had convinced ourselves that we wanted to move, mentally we were all geared up for it, so just to see what our money would buy we visited all the local estate agents collecting property details of anything that we liked, we set our budget at £50,000 more than the price of the church. What did we find - absolutely nothing, we could not even buy a house of the same calibre as ours. So we widened our search area, deciding that maybe out there was another church or barn that was converted or needed converting. Our search took us in to Wales where we viewed another church but it wasnt really where we wanted to live, but at least it was in our price range - just and it came with a detached cottage, but no it was just too far away geographically, we have to also consider our 5 year old daughter's education and friends in all of this. We saw a beautiful barn conversion in the middle of nowhere, but again too far away and a bit on the small side.

We brought our search back to our home town and decided to see how much we would have to spend to get a home that we would want to own. The answer was, 2.5 times the price of the church! We just could not afford that so the search was put on the back burner, we would search the internet every week or so, but very little came up. Everything was too expensive or not what we wanted.

Every so often we would happen to be driving past 'our' church wondering 'what if' and every time we did that estate agents board would still be up outside still declaring the church was for sale. Whats going on we wondered, why is nothing happening?, when the estate agent said that the church was being sold to someone else we were told that their offer had been accepted because they could move quickly and complete within 4 weeks, it was now 2 months!. Every 2-3 weeks we would telephone the estate agents to ask if it was back on the market, but no they would say that the sale was taking slightly longer than planned but was definitely going through.

In September 2006 we made the call again, only to have the same answer. It was now 3 months since we had lost 'our church'. The very next week the estate agent rang to say that the sale HAD fallen through and were we still interested, they said they were calling all interested parties to tell them and that they had a long list to telephone. We said we were interested and that our original offer still stood and to make the offer immediately and not to call anyone else. We were back in the race!

Mortgages and Planning Permission

So there we have it, our offer is accepted on the church and we have accepted an offer on our house. As usual in these things there is a chain. The people buying our house have sold theirs, to someone who has sold theirs to someone else. We are waiting for all the buyers to be in a postion to exchange contracts. Whilst we are waiting there are two vital things for us to do

• Organise a mortgage on a church
• Set about getting the planning permission for a change of use.

The Mortgage

I decided to ask a financial advisor to organise the mortgage, which he thought should be fairly straight forward having looked at some pictures of the church and reviewing our finances. We decided that it would not take more than a week to put this in place and we would deal with it a little closer to the time, once we knew we were closer to an exchange of contracts point.

Planning Permission

This would obviously be the most important thing to deal with. It would be no good at all to have bought a church and then found out that we could not get permission to convert it. As it was it had permission for use as a place of religious service or strangely enough a childrens day care centre! Additionally we knew that once we had got the planning permission we would have to move very quikly to ensure that we werent gazumped by a property developer as the church would be much more valuable once the planning permission was granted.

The first thing we did was to telephone the local planning office at the borough council. They advised us that they were aware of the property and that one planning application had been made previously that had been rejected. They said that in principal there was not a problem but they did have some reservations that needed to be addressed, these mainly related to space for parking and access to and from the property for vehicles.

We downloaded this rejected planning decision from the council website which would give us a clue to the problems. On reading through it, it became apparent that the applicant had wanted to convert the church to a commercial office building and the plans included a row of parking spaces across the front of the church with potentially several vehicles backing on to a busy road.

i then set about drawing up rough sketches of how the building could be converted, room layouts and a stairway to a newly created first floor. drawing and redrawing until we were sure of our layout. Then we could do no more, it was back to the waiting game. Everything had to be timed perfectly, we did not want to get planning permission before everything was settled with the sale of our house. We could not risk putting all the work in to get the permission, only for someone else to snap up the church with that vital permission before we were ready to commit to a mortgage.

We spent many weeks waiting for a sign of our sale completing but there was nothing, we called the estate agents and were told that the bottom of the chain were trying to sort out their mortgage and to wait. Then in June 2006 we heard the bad news, the chain had fallen apart and our buyers were dropping out because their sale had fallen through. We actually took it reasonably well, taking the view that if it had meant to happen it would. But we werent giving up yet. We told the estate agents to get on and find another buyer for ours.