House hunting hasn't been incredibly good fun. Arranging a mortgage hasn't been a barrel of laughs. Surveys, where someone is paid to have a bit of a look around a house, haven't felt like incredibly good value for money (I've spent nearly a thousand pounds on them so far). Overall, I'm left with the feeling that I want this whole house buying process to be over. However, let's say I could snap my fingers and cause the house to be miraculously mine, and the money to be miraculously debited from my accounts to settle everything up. I'd be a few tens of thousand pounds less well off, I'd have a house with a mortgage to pay and a fair amount of work to do to bring it up to the standard it needs to be to be habitable and rentable, which is the plan. There's also the risk, as with any house, that something major might go wrong and need major building works to fix. Which is why you send in surveyors before you buy the place to make sure that anything predictably bust is accounted for.

My telephone call with the surveyor last night was exceedingly worrying. My independent buildings survey, though the more costly of the two, has revealed a number of potentially very expensive problems with the house. Even those problems which are only potential problems, have themselves a fairly high price tag to investigate and an even higher price tag to put right. Now, the numbers might prove worthwhile after all, or they may prove prohibitive. All I'm saying is that things don't look nearly as rosy as they were doing at the start of the process when I appeared to have easy access to funding and speedy response, all in aid of a house which appeared to be head and shoulders above anything else we'd looked at.

With a house market that's increasing prices all the time, and also reducing in breadth for the Christmas break, one might reason that there'll be nothing else available in the near future. However, that's no good reason to buy a house which needs a vast fortune spending on it just to keep it from falling down or whatever. This is not the ideal situation. However, the official surveyor's report, with the actual details of what needs spending, and what might need spending, isn't in. It might not be all that bad.

It might be worse.