And so, the end is here. It is just over 6 months since I posted my first entry, and we have been through so much together. We’ve had:

• snags galore (here and here)
• gadgets galore (here and here)
• near disaster (here and here)
• killer flies (here)
• and sexy lingerie (here).

I hope that my posts have informed and entertained you. They have certainly provided me with a welcome outlet for many of the frustrations involved with buying a new home.

It only remains for me to thank my wife for her unending support and New Build Inspections for sponsoring this blog. Oh yes, and to provide one final, shameless plug for my hilarious novel ‘A Foreign Education’. Please visit my web site at www.CraigAlanWilliamson.com to download a free preview, or head straight to Amazon UK or Amazon USA to buy a copy of the paperback!

New homes come with lots of little hidden costs. For example, did your builder install a door bell for you? How about a house number on your front door? Not even a mirror in the bathroom? Only after you have moved in does the extent of this little list of hidden costs actually become clear. Below is my attempt to forewarn you of some of the more common hidden costs you may have to face:

• Washing line (£5 – £20)
• Door bell (£5 – £50)
• Dustbin (£10 – £15)
• Door mat (£10 – £15)
• Coat hooks (£10 – £25)
• Toilet roll holders (£10 – £25 per bathroom)
• Towel holders (£10 – £25 per bathroom)
• Curtain tracks/poles (£10 – £50 per room)
• House number (£15 – £50)
• Bathroom mirrors (£20 – £50 per bathroom)
• Curtains (£30 – £80 per room)
• Satellite dish installation (£50)
• Connection of phone line (£140)
• TV aerial and loft distribution box (£150 – £200)
• Grass/landscaped garden (£200 – £5,000)
• Carpets (£2,000 – £5,000)

You’ve picked the perfect house style with a workshop area for your impressive collection of power tools, and you’ve selected the perfect plot with a prime view of the all-girls college. Surely your work is done? Well, not quite, as you’ve still got to pick your extras.

‘Extras’ are the additional niceties that you can buy from your builder at the time of purchasing your new home. It’s all too easy to get carried away and spend many thousands of pounds on pointless additions, so make sure that you only go for extras that fulfil at least one of the following criteria:

Good value – Would you like a 50 inch plasma TV in your new lounge for £50? You betcha! Would you like an integrated weighing scale in your kitchen worktop for £300? On your bike!

More practical – If you would like your home fully cabled for satellite TV and computer networking in every room, then you probably don’t want to be ripping out walls once you have moved in. Let the builder do it and you’ll have a much more practical solution.

More convenient – You could turf your new garden yourself, but by the time you get around to doing it the weeds will be several feet high and you may have lost a few small children in there. Paying to have this job taken care of before you move in will probably prove worthwhile.

As well as thinking about extras that you want, it is also worth thinking about the standard features of your new home that you really do not want. For example, we didn’t want a fireplace but one came as standard with our home. It would have been messy and annoying to remove the thing after moving in, so we asked the builder to leave it out. Our reward? A nice empty wall for a big TV, and over £1,000 refunded by the builder. Result!

Unleashing the wife on John Lewis was definitely the right plan. No sooner had I published my last blog entry than we received a phone call to arrange delivery of our new sofa. It arrived last week and we are extremely pleased with the results. Our old sofa was in need of removal from the first floor, but we didn’t fancy incurring all the bumps and scrapes on our walls that happened when it was first moved up there. So my wife baked a few buns, brewed a few cups of tea, and no doubt wore some skimpy lingerie in order to entice a few of the site workmen around to solve the problem. Armed with only chocolate chips, Tetley’s, and plenty of fine lace, she soon arranged a fork lift truck and two sturdy men to winch the old sofa through our first floor balcony. I’ve said this before in this blog and I’ll say it again: if I didn’t have a wife I’d have nothing.

Having the new sofa makes the move more final now. As does the fact that we had the removal company come to collect all of their empty cardboard boxes. As does the fact that we finally gave about 5 boxes full of unwanted but good quality items to a local charity shop, thus clearing up some space in our garage. As does the fact that Christmas is almost here, and my blog will soon be coming to an end! Don’t worry though, I have a few special new home buyer guides planned for the final few weeks. And I might even allow my wife to write an entry on how to flirt with workmen and get things done around your new build house.

Don’t worry, it hasn’t taken me 11 days to sort out those boxes in my spare room. It has just taken me 11 days to regain the will to live. And I have also just switched over from a PC to an Apple Mac (read my switching diary for the proof). And I have a verruca. Oh, wait on, wrong excuse book.

The box sorting was tedious and energy sapping, but it is all done and we now have a loft full of stuff we don’t really need but can’t really bring ourselves to throw away. Left in the wake of the boxes is a spare room that constantly taunts us to dump more stuff in it, but we actually have a room we can use again which is definitely a good thing. I also painted the loft hatch last week but there is still no sign of the new sofa. An angry wife is counting to ten before visiting John Lewis.