But why did you put it on the market in the first place, then?

My Dad hasn't had a stroke, but we don't know what is actually wrong with him. So we're pushing ahead with moving closer to home.

We saw a house about ten days ago. It was nice, the owners seemed sane.  We said we could be a bit flexible about moving, as they still had to buy somewhere new.

We put in an offer last week, deliberately pitched a bit low, but still over the minimum amount advertised . The owners came back and said, unsurprisingly, that that was too low, but they wanted x amount.

The next day, I put in an offer for x amount, and said our timescale for moving was three months. Which seems like bags of time to me.

Then it all started to go a bit tits up. The day after, the estate agent called us to say they needed more time, and were worried about not being able to find somewhere within three months. So we were left hanging over the weekend, but with the expectation that they'd give us a call first thing today.

First thing came and went. Eventually I called up the estate agents, only to be told that the sellers were busy in the morning, but they'd know in an hour. More than an hour later, we got the call, and I feel more and more like walking away.

Three months is apparently too short a timescale for them to move and if they committed to it now they might have to go back on this later on. Yeah, cos that's an entirely reasonable way to behave.

I then got a big sob story relayed to me by the estate agent about how they might have to move in with relatives for a while and could only do this for a couple of weeks because it was awkward with their school run, and appeared to want a completely elastic deadline for handing over the property as it could take a while before they found one they really liked ("It could be two weeks or it could be February - you said you could be flexible so what's the problem?"). Oh yes, and they've now decided they want more money too.

The words that sprung to mind were "fuck" and "off", but I said I'd discuss it with my husband. So we're going to turn it back on them and ask them to make an offer to us.

Thing is, I just have the impression they don't really want to sell. Shame, because it's a nice house.