Sale Price Dilemmas, Contract Exchange and Completion (Buying my First Home)

After getting the survey and electrical inspection, I wanted to reduce my sale price offer. That was somewhat always the plan as I had gone £15,000 over the asking price. Unfortunately, mortgages and interest rates have continued to rise since my mortgage approval, just like it did when I started the application process. When I enquired about reducing the offer to £199,000, I was told the interest had risen to almost 1% more and the monthly payment would also increase. In the end, I decided it wasn't worth the hassle of having to sign all the contracts again, and then I would only end up saving a very small amount overall, because of the interest rate increase. At the time, it was very disheartening but you live and learn going forward. 

Once the inspection was completed, things started to move quite quickly and a moving date was set as the 25th August. The house the sellers were purchasing supposedly required quite a lot of work, including having electrics completed completely from scratch and a brand new kitchen. Due to this, they wanted 2 weeks between exchange of contracts and completion. 

I wanted to re-do the bathroom before I moved in, so I was waiting for my builders to confirm when the work could be done so that I could then confirm the date, as this would determine the moving date, as I wanted it to be done prior to me moving, but also to ensure I didn't have a long period of overlap between my rental and house. That did delay things a little bit, but unfortunately, it was out of my control. I confirmed as soon as a could, paid the deposit and remaining fees, only to find out that all the contracts I had signed and sent online, needed to be posted and seen in person. I sent them first class on Thursday and in order to stick to the original completion date, it needed to be received on the following day....which didn't happen. 

They were received on the Monday and the mortgage was requested from the bank for the same date, however the seller then wanted to delay the move by another work. Unfortunately, once the mortgage funds are requested and released, it's quite a nightmare to delay this by more than 72 hours, so I had to somewhat fight for it to stay. Luckily, despite my solicitor being on annual leave, her stand in was amazing and fought for it as well, so we managed to confirm everything on the Tuesday, with exchange of contracts on the Wednesday and completion set for 2 weeks later.  

What a nightmare!