After three visits, a full and detailed structural appraisal (!) by Nachko Nachko man, and two days of deliberation, we are ready to make an offer on our beautiful pink house.

The asking price is €13,500 – a snip you would think but it is €3,000 more than we currently have! We ask our agent Max to make an initial offer of €10,000. Unsurprisingly, this is swiftly rejected.

Another day goes by and we finally agree a price of €11,900. We’re happy enough with this – I just hope the vendors go through with the sale now. If all goes to plan, we could be the owners in about six weeks’ time. This is much quicker than we thought!

The next stage is going to be very funny. Foreigners are not allowed to own land in Bulgaria but companies can. So, because the house comes with land, we have to register a Bulgarian company. Rob and I will be the company directors, which sounds very grand. It’s just a formality which the agents and lawyers are used to dealing with. To set up this company we have to go see a lawyer called Boris in Sofia who will help us open a Bulgarian bank account. This all sounds immensely dodgy but Boris is president of some Bulgarian law society and, by all accounts is a big cheese. He and Max are sporting buddies and Boris does the property-related stuff on the side of his regular big jobs. So, that’s our task for the next couple of days – go see Boris, think of a name for our Mickey Mouse company and set up a bank account. Scary!