There is something truly magic about walking into your home for the very time after it has become yours – that initial looking around it and choosing whether to buy, whatever your choices are, don’t count in this respect. I remember when we bought our first house, a victorian mid terrace villa, it was a shabby little place but the efforts we’d had to go to to obtain the finance to buy it and then some flaming hooops in the legals running up to completion – wooh! So on moving in day, hearts in mouth and stomachs fluttering like never before, we moved in our pathetically tiny number of possessions, we felt like millionnaires and it was just so exciting. It turned out to be a fairly short sit in fact because the area was more ethnically diverse for my comfort, and we had our eyes on a larger and more modern semi detached in the next county. In that first starter purchase we cut our teeth in that the conveyancing process threw up a few curved balls, like the vendor suddenly gazzumping us on the morning of completion. Deciding to instruct her solicitor to threaten to withdraw the sale if we did not cough up more money after she ‘received another substantial offer in cash’ a month after signing her contract to sell to us at the originally agreed sum. Ha, mean trick. I had to ring my bank and beg a loan of £750. Not much by todays standards but it cost us a pretty penny as it was classed as a bridging loan.