Two wheels on my wagon ...

But I'm still rolling along. Just.

It has been a terrible few days. Everything had seemed to be rolling along smoothly, if rather more slowly than we'd have liked and then it started to unravel

As of Thursday morning, we were finally in a position to exchange contracts on both the houses. Then we had a call on Thursday afternoon to say that the vendor of the house we were buying with Carl was pulling out.

We'd been forewarned this might happen overnight and we'd already started looking for a rental property as a stop-gap (we simply have to have somewhere in the Kettering area as Carl needs somewhere to live, Jane needs to stay in work for a little while longer and we need an address). Of itself, it was not the end of the world

And then on Friday morning whilst eating breakfast before watching "Safe Return" being lifted out for the survey, the second wheel came loose. The estate agents phoned to say that our buyers wanted a structural engineer to examine a crack in the wall of the house. Why this wasn't raised weeks ago I do not know (actually, I have my suspicions but that's neither here nor there). I doubt there is a genuine issue (the crack, such as it is, is almost certainly due to settlement of the wall under the side window of the French windows we had installed eight years or so ago) but I suspect an issue is going to be made of it

There's every chance we are going to loose the sale on the house and have to start again with the added hassle and expense of having this crack repaired first so that we don't run into the same problem second time around.

The reality is that we cannot keep pushing forward without regard to the risk that we're simply going to over-reach ourselves. It's looking increasingly unlikely that we'll be able to get the house sale though in an acceptable time scale to buy "Safe Return" and to make matter worse if the costs rise much further our budget is going to be looking extremely tight anyway

So sadly we've had to accept that "Safe Return" has gone back on the market. Carol has been really great over things so far and we're not prepared to mess her around for another few weeks unless we are 100% confident of going ahead and the reality is that we cannot be that sure

There's still a chance, maybe even a good chance, that we'll be able to buy "Safe Return" after all but if someone else snaps her up before we have the cash in hand it'll be a case of it wasn't meant to be

All we can do now is wait for the results of the structural engineer's visit and go from there.