He came, he surveyed, he went away. And so did the bank’s surveyor too. The net result of which we have a mortgage offer, and know exactly what’s wrong with our house. The homebuyer’s report is an amazingly arse-covering document; a whole bunch of things that I hadn’t even thought of as being worthy of my attention are flagged up as “Urgent! Needs sorting right now!”. These things include that the fuse box is old (but still servicable; the wiring’s reasonably recent), there’s no banister on the bottom three stairs, and that the doors have non-safety glass in them. The one thing I didn’t know about was that there’s some damp in the extension, but it doesn’t seem to be anything that’ll cost a lot to fix.

I’m glad I paid a completely independent surveyor; my surveyor had the ability to spell complicated words like “Asbestos” (the garage roof’s made of it; given it’s over twenty years old that’s not surprising) and to count to four – the number of bedrooms –  unlike the bank’s guy who counted three, and also decided that the house was worth less than we’d offered for it. Happily on that point the bank seem to have ignored him and decided to lend the amount requested anyway (and my own surveyor, who didn’t know the offer price, had agreed with me on value spot-on).

So, it progresses. And given the competency level of the bank’s surveyor, I wonder just what else in the way of fail we’re going to encounter.