Go to Bali or nearby islands, build your own beachside hut.

Open up the cupboards check for signs of painting over problems. When people repaint to sell, they hardly ever consider the buyer will open the cupboards to look for signs of problems not painted over.

Turn on the lights in every room and the outside ones, check for electrical faults covered over.

Rising damp is a serous problem. I've moved five times in the last 14 years, I'll list issues I found because I didn't heed my own advice.

We sold a house that my DH had lived in between 1975 and 2003. Made a nice profit even though we sold it without doing anything to hide faults. We'd had the bathrooms renovated about five years previously, so they were still really good without any problems. The rest, the new owners gutted and rebuilt. It was what they wanted.

We went down to the coast 800 kms away to live a dream -- long walks on the beach, and retirement while we were still young enough to enjoy it. Every house we looked at needed renovating. I wish we'd bought one of those and spent the money the house we bought cost us.

We bought the one we thought had been recently renovated only to find, on the first night in the house that the cupboards had been painted over on the outside, but were in a mess inside. The bathrooms: the main bedroom en suite one, used to be a toilet in a passage which they'd broken through the walls in the bedroom and removed the passage/corridor walls to make space for it. The shower they'd put in there was falling off the wall and the toilet leaked.

The other bathroom's bath had been painted over, so it looked good until we used it and the paint peeled off. We ended up having to replace both bathrooms. There was a study that was previously a veranda from the living room, enclosed with wooden windows that we wanted to replace with aluminium to repair gaps in the wood. When they removed the windows, the walls above the wood fell down because they hadn't put in a lintel to hold up the wood, we had to rebuild the whole room. In the kitchen, they'd painted over the tiling to make fit look like new tiling. The paint peeled off after a year of my washing the tiles. There was a garden cottage that looked good until my sister who moved in used the shower room. Everything leaked, so all the fittings had to be replaced. Check for repairs, see if they've been done properly, if not be prepared to spend money fixing short cuts.

I didn't learn. We're not allowed to have electric outlets in our bathrooms. But we bought a little cottage in a retirement village with a shower room and a single bedroom, in a retirement village where we planned to live out the rest of our lives. One morning I woke up to put my feet onto the floor, in a pool of water. The pipes for the washing machine in the bathroom had burst and proved to be the cause of the damp in the garden behind the bedroom, because of the cheap short cut plumbing they'd done in the bathroom. Luckily the insurance paid for the whole mess to be cleaned up and the washing machine had to be moved to the kitchen because the electric outlet in the bathroom, and the leaking pipes were removed. What looks like a good idea, sometimes proves to be some self-styled handyman's work and a mess. Outside the kitchen door, the builders had sloped the paving at the back door towards the house so when we had a patio enclosed there, the rain washed into the patio. We had to get some plumbing done under the window to fix the problem. Even houses built in a new development can have weird problems. So check for the flow of water outside that it doesn't flow towards the house.

Then we moved back home three years ago. We spent three days going from house to house in a 100 year old+ suburb to find something that suited us with a pool and a garden cottage for my son, whose health problems had prompted the move for him to have somewhere to live. I didn't want a pool but the men insisted, so I gave in. When I questioned that the pool looked green, the agent saiid they'd painted it that colour. I should've insisted the men examine this because I can't bend down to check, but I overlooked it, and now we have to have it emptied, the marbleliite redone and the motor replaced because it's permanently green in summer. The "green paint" was 30-year-old algae growth.

The cottage that looked lovely has a rising damp problem. Short of tearing it down and rebuilding it, I don't know how to fix it. We're going to have to spend a fair amount of money doing that, or my son will have to sell his 100+ year old home when he inherits it after our deaths, and take the loss. The walls around the inner garden where the pool is, is a mess with plaster falling off, and the door that was fitted in that wall doesn't close anymore. I need a gate fitted there with repairs done to the wall so we get back that security. The lights, I think the previous owners got "fly by night" electricians to write the certificate for the electricity because some of the lights flickered and died after a year of living here, and now when I turn on the outside light at night, the lights in the living room that are charging the rechargeable lightbulbs turn on. So I'm going to have to get an electrician to give the house a thorough going-over. One of my other sons paid to have the bath removed, and replaced with a walk in shower because the "renovated" bathroom covered up leaks and a bath that had been destroyed by being scrubbed with an abrasive cleaner that took off the top coating when they replaced the original bath with a "plastic" one.

Buying a used home is tricky. I really should've gone for a cheaper one needing a cottage built and repairs done, and there was one like that that I liked but it didn't have a cottage so we didn't buy it. I'm sorry about that now.

What I'm saying is, check everything before committing and be prepared for renovations. If you find one that needs repairs in an area you like, rather do the repairs yourself, at least you'll know what''s done and to your satisfaction.

Experiential advice is absolutely invaluable, so many thanks for that Agrippina.

The truth is that I'm still not sure whether I personally will be able to buy a house, but buying a house isn't just about me, so I'm hopeful many other readers will benefit from the comments here. Please ALL bombard us with your insights to a view to benefitting us ALL.