Desperate for help! I'm buying a house but...
Help please! I'm in the process of buying a house. The contracts were sent to my solicitors last week and we should be able to sign them in the next few days. The seller is a friend and the house is currently vacant, so we drop by it once every few weeks to pick up his post, check everything's okay etc. We've just been by, and there's a notice on the door saying it's being repossesed on Tuesday! The seller has an IVA set up, and has had a bankruptcy put aside by the courts to enable him to sell the house. We knew he had some money problems, but as the courts had cleared the sale etc., we thought everything was taken care of. As well as spending a lot of money on surveys, solicitors etc, we've also spent nearly �10,000 on the house itself. The mortgage company wouldn't give us the money until certain work had been done on it, including re-wiring, fitting a new kitchen, re-building an outside wall and lots of other stuff. We came to an agreement with the seller that he would knock �15,000 off the price of the house, we'd do the work, and if he then withdrew the sale, he'd pay us for what we'd done. So what now? If we can sign the contracts next week, does that put us in the clear - they can't legally take it then can they? And what if the contracts take longer to sort out? Will it just be re-posessed and leave us 'in the ****"? And what about the new kitchen, and the other stuff we've put in there? Some of it was from friends and family, and the seller's mortgage company says that if we don't have receipts, they can take that as well. And even if we take out the kitchen, it's not exactly much use without a house to put it in! I can't get hold of my solicitor until Monday and I'm in a terrible panic - please, please, can anyone tell me what I've got myself into here?