When it came to buying my ‘forever house’, I started by breaking the Golden Rule: Don’t attempt to buy a property before your current home is under offer. I’ll add a caveat to that: Don’t start looking before you’ve actually made the decision to sell.

Useful pieces of advice – both of which I chose to ignore. My house in London wasn’t on the market because I’d no intention of moving, but a chance flick though Country Life changed all that. A picture of a derelict farmhouse in Dorset had me convinced that this was the house for me and my family... for ever.

In our urgency to secure it, we put in an asking-price offer (‘our house will sell within days’) and sent architects down to help plan our new home. Only then did we ring the estate agent and put our own house up for sale. We had a lot of viewings, a very cheeky offer and then it all went rather quiet.

At first, we didn’t panic – and then we did. In our desperation not to lose the forever house, we very nearly badly undersold and for a minute (it was just a minute) thought of a bridging loan. We fobbed off the poor Dorset agent for months, saying we had ‘numerous interested parties on the verge of buying’ but eventually, the trustees – it was a probate sale – got fed up and accepted another offer.

I can still remember my husband calling – ‘I’ve got bad news..’ – and me bursting into tears in a supermarket. That thud of disappointment was followed by what felt like a bereavement. The only thing that helped was the realisation that mentally, we’d taken the ‘move step’ and knew it was what we wanted to do. I kept telling myself ‘this is all for the best, these things always work out’. But I wasn’t convinced.

About a month before, an agent had sent me details of another farmhouse in the same area with a note saying: ‘This is actually the house for you’. I could see what he meant. In fact, it looked way too good to be true and, as I never wanted to feel the pain of losing a house again, I refused to view it until we had sold our own.

A fortnight later, our house was under offer and ‘could we move quickly’? We made an appointment to view the farmhouse the next day. As we drove in, we knew we’d come home and made an offer from a field.

The agent had been right: this house was much, much better than the other one in every way and four years on, we couldn’t be happier. Each morning I look out over the river and cannot believe how lucky I am that I’m here, and not there.

BM, Dorset

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