After a long process we are finally moving house!

We finally exchanged at the end of last week and are completing (moving in) on Monday 19th October. Moving from Fishbourne (Chichester) in West Sussex to North Bersted (Bognor Regis).

The new house is a large 1937 semi-detached property with 4 bedrooms, garage etc, but what we really loved was the garden. It has an 80 foot rear garden, but this then leads on to a 0.3 acre woodland, which is all part of the property.

Here are some pictures.

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No inside pictures.

The inside needs a lot of work to bring it up to date. The Kitchen and Bathroom are being ripped out as soon as we move in and the rest of the house redecorated. It also has fireplaces in the lounge and dining room, but they are both blanked off with electric and gas fires in front. We are getting those removed and the original fireplaces reinstated, with an open fire in the lounge and a wood burner in the dinning room.


Some history.

As some of you know I've had a bit of a house nightmare over the past few years.

We purchased a newly built house in 2006 and happily lived there for years. However in the 2012 storms the house flooded and we had to move out for 6 months whilst it was dried out and restored. Bit of a nightmare anyway, but made worse because my son was only 5 weeks old when it happened. The house wasn't in a flood plain and whilst Fishbourne village did have a history of flooding, the actual house's location didn't, so no authority or service was interested in investigating the causes, or putting into place any preventative measures.

After being restored we moved back in December 2012, just in time for Christmas. Roll on a year and Christmas eve 2013 the UK had another really bad storm with very heavy rainfall, and guess what? The house flooded on Christmas Eve! Luckily we were going away for Christmas to our parents, but did manage to secure a rented property the same day. A really nice 16th century cottage. The house was again restored and in April 2014 we put it on the market for sale. We stayed in the rented cottage until August. We had a few offers and 2 near sales, but they both pulled out when they discovered we had flooded twice and not once (out estate agent wasn't the best). So we moved back into the house in August and continued to try and sell it.

We did a lot on this time to get everything possible investigated. We contacted every agency (Environment, Highways, local water, planning control etc), and whilst initially no interested in helping once we got out PM involved they suddenly all investigated and checked everything for us. Sadly we didn't achieve any proper answers, but all of the drainage system in Fishbourne has since been cleaned and maintained, and all ditches and balance ponds cleared. Plus the local pumping station renewed.

The government then announced a flood grant scheme so we looked into this and discovered we could claim up to £5K towards flood prevention work. We had a flood survey carried out, as well as an independent surveyor whom investigated everything to work out the best preventative solution. The total works ended up costing about £7K, but we did get the full £5K grant towards it. We had special air vents with none return valves, flood barriers to front and back doors, all walls sealed, and a foundation sump pump fitted to extract any water that got into the house's foundations.

Roll on to April 2015 and the estate agent wasn't being that great so we took the house off the market and and put it on with another agent whom was also a chartered surveyor and knew about selling houses with flood history. With the flood prevention work now completed they found us an investment buyer within 4 weeks!

Now 4 months after that we have finally exchanged and are moving to our new house in a couple of weeks. We had a short sales chain, but the house we purchases had a lot of complications because the owners had lost a lot of paperwork regarding things like Deeds and Tree preservation orders. Anyway, that is now all sorted and we are moving!!