Sorry to have ignored your questions kimtwin, I posted and wandered off!
It took two years. There was enough equity in the house to sell up and for both of us to get a smaller place with a mortgage. I did not want to stay in the family home as it had too many bad associations, was out in the sticks and had a massive garden that was all full of his rubbish. I would have been receptive to XH buying me out as he wanted to stay there, but he couldn't afford it.
My solicitor said that however intransigent a soon-to-be-ex may be, in his experience they tend to become a lot more reasonable in the face of a legal letter. STBXH may say divorce is "out of the question", but when the law says it is NOT out of the question, that's when he would have to start thinking about how it might work, and coming to a negotiated agreement with you.
I won't lie though, it was hellish for that couple of years. He would try to make me change my mind by being really nice, but unfortunately - or in another sense fortunately - he could never keep it up for more than a few days before descending into a bullying rant, or saying something so dreadful and crass it would take my breath away, or worst of all, putting pressure on DS4. The thing was, it was only a concentrated version of what he'd been doing for years, that I had been trying to live with and rationalise away and had gone very nearly mad in the process. Once I'd seen it for what it was, him stepping it up only made him appear more reprehensible and, yes, also pathetic. When he'd try to wind me up by pressing one of those well-worn buttons, the thing that really got me angry was the fact that he was trying to wind me up, rather than the issue he was doing it over, if that makes sense. He was so stupid, because all he had to do was not be horrible and I would have stayed. Divorce was against everything I believed in (not to mention expensive) and the DCs said they wanted us to stay together, and I knew he was a bit mentally ill and would have carried on forgiving his funny little ways, carried on doing all the earning and the housework, dealing with the DCs' emotional and psychological needs and the bills and the responsibility for pretty much everything, and putting up with (occasionally even paying for) the old junk he just had to fill every available space with, just so long as he was kind to me... but he just couldn't do it. I suppose he did me a favour really, because now I don't have to put up with any of it.