… I’m trying to buy a house. My current domicile is a bit too small for my girlfriend and children, and the neighbourhood — although fine for a bachelor about town — is not quite where you’d choose to bring up two girls.

This is proving to be something of a tricky business. Do I sell mine off (with all the attendant hassle of dealing with estate agents, buyers, chains, and so on) but collect a wodge of cash with which to buy a new place?

Do I hang on to it, rent it out, coin it that way, but lumber myself with a big mortgage and deal with the uncertainties of the rental market over the long term? To say nothing of the associated hassles of being a landlord and finding tenants, keeping the place up to date, spending half the annual rent income on the sort of emergencies that are bound to crop up…?

Or perhaps buy a new-build, where they’ll part-exchange (so solving the whole ‘having to sell mine and deal with a chain’) but have to worry about the quality of new-build homes in the UK which is oft reported as being poor?

After sitting down with my SO it looks like new-build is the way to go. If (and this could well be a big “if”) things go to plan the process should be fairly smooth. I won’t need to move out of my place until the new one is built, and, armed with lots of useful consumer research information we should be able to ensure that we don’t get stuck with a badly built lemon of a house.

So we’ve been looking around for the past couple of weeks and think we’ve found a style of house and developer (Persimmon) we can deal with. We think. So over the coming months I’m planning on chronicling the process here. Hopefully this might be useful information to someone in the future, and maybe someone reading an entry might be able to offer up a word or two of wisdom.