An experience not to be repeated

What does a girl have to do to buy a flat around here?

By Zaneta Skerlev of the BBC Macedonian Service

"Why rent when you can buy!" were the screaming headlines in the newspapers that finally made us decide. And anyway, how difficult can it be to find a small one-bedroom flat in a big town like London?

But, how ignorant we were. First we didn't really know where to look. Someone's good area is somebody else's place from hell. We made a list of areas in London where looking for a flat was recommendable and affordable. One London area was scrapped from the list without thinking twice after television reports of two murders in one month.

So with the reduced list in our hands we saw basements that smell of my grandmother's cellar, ground floor flats that were half a metre under ground. Then there were the so-called "studios", you know the type of living space where if you stretch your arms while in bed you will reach the bathroom towel.

And to our horror, everything was so old. It took us sometime realise that the older the house, the higher the price. "They don't build houses like this anymore" said one estate agent, proudly. They certainly don't, we thought whoever did that died centuries ago.

In my country basically, they sell new flats. New is good, old is bad is the reasoning that in nine out of ten cases proves to be true where we come from. But not here, not in England. Here everything is different from back home. Old house are better than new houses.

Home or hovel?

Flats usually don't have double-glazed windows. They have carpets in the bathrooms, sometimes, even in the kitchen. You rarely have showers with the bath, in the best case there is a plastic hose mixing hot and cold water and pretending to be a shower. And all the floors squeak.

And then, even when you change your standards and decide that "the one-bedroom in Wimbledon wasn't so bad after all," you're faced with even more confusion. You see there is this thing called "exchange of contracts."

Even if the sellers have accepted your offer, in England you don't actually get to buy the flat until your solicitor and their solicitor have exchanged contracts. And when that finally happened, we were the happiest couple in the world.

It didn't matter that we discovered that the roof was leaking and even later that the living room in summer gets extremely hot. So what, summers in Britain last only a couple of weeks anyway. And the roof was fixed after only five months of intensive telephone communication with the maintaining agency.

We had our flat and we solemnly swore that we were never ever going to repeat the experience ever!

But here we are two years later, looking for a bigger two-bedroom flat. Some people never learn.