Yes....a few years (and houses) back we fell in love with a certain road in my home town and in particular one of only three houses of individual design. These were 1880s large, detached Victorian properties and there was nothing else like them in the whole area. Our particular favourite had a dark stone facade you lot would most likely consider it spooky and it looked untouched which is how we like our houses, lol!
Months went by of me dreaming of this house, when out of the blue it came up for sale. We were the first people to view it and we were correct in our assumption that as well as being 3500 sq ft with sux bedrooms, it still contained many of its original features - four huge marble fireplaces and a massive dresser in the flagstoned kitchen.......sigh, we were in love.....
We immediately put our (very nice detached four bed Victorian) house on the market and arranged a second viewing on the dream house. Unfortunately by then they'd received an offer - from a friend, as it turned out, who intended to convert it to a nursery school. We were horrified and doubled our efforts to get ours sold, but we were out of luck - by the time we had received an offer it was too late. I was so disappointed!
Fast forward a few weeks and I was telling an acquaintance about this and she amazingly announced that her FIL owned the house next door - one of the three - he was looking to sell as it was an investment property, he and his wife now living in the US. We arranged for them to call me when they were next in the UK - they did and we viewed the house (which had been converted to four flats in the 1960s) with them immediately agreeing to sell privately to us!
It was in a slightly worse state than house number one - and the once grand impressive hallway had been divided up when converted - but the bones (and two marble FPs and a built in dresser) were there. Buying it was a long and arduous process as he first had to serve notice on the tenants - two of whom refused to leave and had to be evicted.
In the interim our sale went through, our stuff went into storage and we moved in with the 'rents' for six weeks. The day we completed I couldn't actually believe the house was ours!
We restored it to its former glory and lived there very happily for ten years but sold up when we realised it was too big for us.
We recently bought another house that I'd spotted on RM, fell in love with (even though it was SSTC) and couldn't believe my luck when the sale fell through. We put ours on the market, accepted an offer within the first five weeks and the new 'dream house' was still waiting.....moved into our amazing Arts & Crafts home in December......