After much discussion and asking for advice on here we decided to ignore all your advice and go with our hearts and made a stupidly low offer in July. Needless to say this was refused and the seller said he was insulted by our offer! We then wrote a long email detailing all the faults we found and asked them to let us know if they changed there mind. Some of the faults can be seen in the pics below:

Poor standard of workmanship with doors that didn't open; tiles falling off the walls; messy wiring & plumbing; exposed wiring running across the floor and rubbing on steel; and as seen in photos on first entry, a useless child’s bedroom and boatman’s cabin area.

Then there were the problems with the boat itself, the main ones being the cracks around front window and cracked porthole glass:

There was also the potential re-bottoming work that needed doing as a previous survey suggested that the rear half of the boat had already been done but the front half would need doing very soon.

After 2-3 weeks we phoned them up and asked if there had been much interest in the boat and if they would consider a revised offer subject to survey and we were told by the broker that they needed to sell to clear outstanding finance and we had been the only people to show serious interest. We made a revised offer on 30th July which was refused but after increasing it by £2000 we made it clear that was our final offer and we would not be able to increase any further. The broker phoned back 2 hrs later after they should have been closed to say it had been accepted