I've been house hunting in Edinburgh for a year now and I'm ready to give up

Clambering up the Edinburgh property ladder is hard work.

Every rung is greased with slippery lard. While you’re waiting to find the right place, it seems that prices rise by the millisecond.

As ever, this city is the most expensive place in Scotland to buy property. 

Everyone wants to live in the capital. I just wish it wasn’t so appealing. We need to shoehorn in a few more high rise car parks, make Edinburgh Castle into student flats and build a motorway over the Meadows, so that house prices drop and I can clamber up. Joking, obvs. 

When we bought our current flat ten years ago, there was a bit of a lull in the market, and we weren’t in a chain, so the process seemed a lot easier. 

At the moment, we’re a year into our search for a new gaff. 

It feels longer. I’ve stopped telling pals about it, because I feel they don’t believe me when I say I’ll be moving soon. Or they’ll pop out the old chestnut “what’s meant for you, won’t pass you by”. Meh.

Our flat has become a weird limbo, like the waiting room in Beetlejuice. 

Georgian flat in Edinburgh | Adobe

We want to make it nice, but only for potential viewers, not for us. We won’t be living here for long. Supposedly.

They say, if you can’t be with the one you love, then love the one you’re with. But that costs money and I just can’t be bothered painting the bedroom in fresh blank canvas white.  Anyway, it’s already Farrow & Ball Charleston Grey in there. I insisted on it, when we moved in, and it probably would’ve been cheaper to have painted the whole room in Chanel lipgloss. 

Thus, the colour is staying, even if it does make the space look haunted.

Same goes for the decade-old Ikea sofa, which appears to have been beaten to a pulp by Tyson Fury, then commandeered by 50 overweight cats. There’s no point replacing it now. We’ll cover it with a throw, if we ever get to the point of viewers coming round. 

The broken blinds. Oh well. They’ll be binned when we move.

Not only do we not want to invest in our home, we’re also so bored of saving. I have become a total penny pincher.

Anyway, over the course of a year, we’ve only put four offers in on properties so far, because nothing is coming on the market. I know, because I scan the ESPC website about 30 times a day. Whenever a goodie does appear, it becomes a bun fight. 

In the summer, there was one place that had 11 notes of interest. It went to closing, and eight offered.  We got half way up the line. 

There was another, in Leith, that we put an offer in for, but then someone snuck in, went higher and they accepted that instead. Curses.

This property buying business favours the brave, and we are not. We are a pair of quivering lily-livered financial fearties.

There was one other place that was way overpriced and had zero interest. They refused our reasonable offers, even though they’d been languishing on the market for two years. We gave up. Another fail.

However, the last place that we fell in love with was our closest win. We came in at number two, but there’s no silver medal.

I really thought that was The One and that it wasn’t going to pass me by. 

The problem with house hunting is that you have to really fall for a property, before you can achieve the psychological momentum to offer. 

We went to view it twice and played the usual game - trying to look cool as cucumbers, while our insides went all giggly and excited. 

“Do you love it?” I asked him, in the living room. “Yeah”, he whispered. 

It was a nice size, with Victorian cornicing and the piece-de-resistance of a wood-burning stove. 

They always have close-ups of these on schedules these days. They’ve become the visual equivalent of the smell of baking bread or coffee. (I know, they’re not environmentally friendly and possibly carcinogenic, too, but we’d just use ours decoratively, bar Christmas Day). 

The flat had a garden, too, though when you walked into it, and glanced to the right, you were staring directly into the neighbour’s kitchen. That was a bit weird, but it’s all about compromise.

I spent the next weekend scoping out the location, since it’s a bit further out of the city centre and I wasn’t familiar with it. I walked up the street and round the block. It was a thumbs up.

We dug deep for that one. Went a bit wild and accepted that we’ll never be able to retire because we’d be yoked to a massive mortgage. 

It went to a closing date, with four notes of interest, including us. After emailing the offer, we counted our chickens and began tidying, manically and frantically. 

He cleaned the windows and I put my entire wardrobe on Vinted. We even went to a garden centre and bought dusty pink pansies and bright echinacea, since our estate agent said that we needed to work on our curb appeal.

But that was before the result came in. After the initial relief at knowing we wouldn’t have to get our flat on the market tout suite and we’d dodged spending the weekend clearing out the cellar, the disappointment set in, again.

Since then, there has been nothing of note. It looks like we’ll be stuck here over the winter. 

Oh well, what’s meant for you.