I can’t actually remember at exactly what point Matthew and I started looking at houses, but I’m pretty sure we’ve always been set on a new build.

If I’m being perfectly honest, I’d never really thought about new builds before, probably because there aren’t so many new builds around where I’ve always lived, but Matthew was pretty set on wanting one, and as soon as we started looking, even just at photos online, I was pretty easily swayed.

We were very lucky in that moving up north gave us a much better range of houses within our budget – we could have never afforded a place in Bournemouth – and we quickly settled on one particular developer that we loved almost every single type of house they built: Bellway. We did look around some other homes from other developers, but we just found that Bellway had the nicest houses, but also the most relaxed and friendly sales staff.

We also very quickly found the house that we wanted – the Oakwood – and it was really just a case of finding an Oakwood in an area that we liked, although we cared more about getting the house than we cared about exactly where it was, so long as it was within the wider area which Matthew’s job needs him to be living in, and that was when we found our house.

One of the draws of a new build for most people is having the ability to choose many of the features of your house, such as the kitchen cabinets, bathroom tiles, carpets and flooring etc. Well, we didn’t quite manage that. Most of the big decisions about the house have to be made before a certain stage of the build, and as our house was already mainly built when when we put down our reservation fee, we didn’t get to choose the kitchen design or any of the bathroom tiles, but the only thing that really bothered me about that was that I don’t like the kitchen worktop, but the rest is absolutely fine. We did get to choose our carpets and flooring as those are pretty much the last things to be fitted in the house, and while we’ll probably replace the vinyl in the kitchen and bathrooms eventually, we really like the choices that we made and they suit the rest of the house really well.

The good thing about the build being started before we bought it was that there were a lot of incentives thrown in. When developers are on a tight timeframe for completing a development, they really want to sell off the houses that are already built before they start on the next batch, and that was basically exactly what happened with ours. Before we’d even seen the house, they’d already upgraded the kitchen to include some appliances that normally aren’t included as standard, such as a fridge-freezer and dishwasher, and when we were looking at putting down the reservation fee, they agreed to also throw in turf and fences for the garden, as well as paying our stamp duty, which saved us a bunch! We did choose to pay for a few additional extras – downlights in the kitchen, and a shaver socket in the bathroom – but that was it for us as they had to be paid for up front.

Annoyingly, due to work being done every time we went up, we didn’t get to actually go inside our house until our official home demo – where the site manager shows us around and explains how to open the windows, where the fuse box in etc – but actually it was nice to just see it all finished.

Really, we had a pretty smooth experience. It was less than 3 months from seeing the house for the first time to completing, and that was a blessing really as buying somewhere so far from where we live right now could have been a nightmare.

There’s going to be so much more house content coming soon, so stay tuned!

Twitter / Bloglovin / Instagram