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!