Owning your own home

Off to Margate then?

Nope. Too far. Although we do have friends in Ramsgate, Margate and Ramsgate are both too far for a 4 or 5 day a week commute. An hour (and a bit) is about my limit.

It's Faversham. Not quite the coast i'll grant you but close enough. It's on the creek with the marshes on the doorstep for runs, cycling and bird watching and the coast proper is just 10 mins away. It's a 1 hour fast train into london and I get a discount on the ticket with work.

We love the town. It's got really good vibes: nice cafes, record shops, book shops, guitar shops, a good food market, good folk music scene there and in Canterbury 15 mins down the road. It's got loads of great pubs as the shepherd neame brewery is there. It's got greenery and good schools it's closer to family and we have a couple of close friends there already. We've got a 5 month old baby and it feel like this our chance to trade up to a house that will hold all of us, any future additions, have guests over to stay and house a basement studio for me and my guitars... all for significantly less than the asking price on a 2 bed flat in SE23.

We love it here in Forest Hill but I feel like we'd mad not to take advantage of the relative state of the market in the two places to upsize our accommodation, downsize our debt and basically secure our future.

Still waiting to hear back which makes me think we've actually pitched it just right. If we'd gone too low we'd know by now and if we'd overshot they'd be all over us. Just got to wait to see what happens with this place now.