Finally, after weeks of secrecy, I can come clean and admit that I've actually done it: I've bought a house. Usually, a seismic shift of these proportions would inspire countless Winging It columns, discussing exactly what effects this was going to have on my lifestyle, my drinking habits and my love life.
Instead, I've kept uncharacteristically quiet about the whole thing (in print at least) until the whole deal was done and dusted, because I became chronically afflicted with another very uncharacteristic emotion: superstition.
Any mention of the house, estate agent, or closing date has been accompanied by furious wood-touching, finger-crossing, and ju-ju muttterings to the gods, so obviously writing about such a cosmically volatile subject was absolutely taboo. I had fallen prey to the peculiar form of paranoia familiar to anyone trying to buy a house in today's property market, when reasonably priced properties are like the philosopher's stone or Lord Lucan's e-mail address.
When you're looking for a house, you talk about possible properties in low whispers, even if you're sitting in your own kitchen with one other person. If someone asks where you want to buy, you look terribly vague and say "Ah, the Drumcondra/ Liberties/Maynooth area", and quickly change the subject, terrified that an unseen listener might swoop in and double your offer for that garden shed in Rathmines.
When the day comes and you find something you think you could live in, the smallscale conspiracy theories start in earnest. In the first-time buyer price bracket, there's rarely anything as dramatic as an actual auction, which would doubtless be thoroughly nerve-wracking but would at least offer the opportunity to judge whether your rival bidders are the type to have pockets lined with gold or whether they're just chancers like yourself. Instead, I had to bid for my house by closed bid, a process guaranteed to induce Orwellian levels of double-thinking in even the most rational of folk.
The guide price usually sounds like a vast sum you will have to work until the age of 75 to pay off, so at this stage an additional £50 on top sounds about right. Your helpful friends and advisers soon put you right on this and suggest that you add another five grand to the original price, if you really want to outbid everyone else.
At 4 a.m. you sit bolt upright in bed with the certain knowledge that all the other shadowy, sinister bidders for your dream house will bump up their offers by five grand too, so you mentally add another £500 onto your offer. At 5 a.m. you start wondering whether you should go into the next stamp duty bracket, just to see off the competition; an hour later, you realise that everybody else will also have thought of this ploy, so you toss in another few hundred pounds.
By now you've ceased to think of these figures as actual money and have started to treat the whole thing as a bit of a board game. After all, it's not as if you've actually got this sum, so it might as well be paper money. The problem with all this mental wheeling and dealing is that you leave yourself precious little time to think about whether you actually want the darned house or whether you're just determined to outwit all the other bidders.
You're plotting to spend more money than you ever have before on something you've seen for a grand total of 10 minutes. I've spent more time looking at the merits of a bikini. So there were two voices squabbling in my head: one was saying, "bung on another few grand and blow them out of the water" - while the other was saying things like, "It's a rabbit hutch! I didn't see any plumbing! What if there's bodies beneath the floor boards?"
I was lucky; I got the first house for which I put in an offer, and breathed a sigh of relief for all of five minutes. Then the deluge of fears and anxieties washed over me, as the realisation dawned that I had just promised to hand over an impossibly huge amount of money for what I was now visualising as a glorified cardboard box. What's more, I was being asked for the details of my solicitor, surveyor, and mortgage consultant, by people who seemed to be under the mistaken impression that I was a grown-up or something.
I'm sure buying a house was always a fairly nerve-wracking business - the statistic bandied about is that it's third only to bereavement and divorce in the stress top 10. But it's surely much more terrifying now than ever before, if only for the obvious reason that there's a lot more money at stake than ever before. First time buyers used to be able to cut their teeth with simple shacks and hovels, which they could buy for a few thousand pounds and spend their time doing up with bits of wickerwork and a lot of magnolia paint.
Now those trying desperately to get on the property ladder for the first time - and we're the lucky ones who have a chance of getting out of the rental sector at all - are buying the same shacks for a ridiculously large amount of money. There's very little margin for error, deliberation or risk when you're signing over your life's savings at the start of your life's work.
The whole process is not helped by the level of scare-mongering that surrounds buying property either. Fear of a supposedly voracious demand for small houses has lead to people paying out crazy money, and ensured that there are neither finite values to property nor a sense of certainty about your investment. So it's hardly surprising if first-time buyers are getting a little paranoid about the whole business because, unfortunately, all too often they are all out to get us.
My house-buying story ended happily with the handover of the keys last week, but spare a thought for those who have still to roll the dice in an increasingly high-stakes game of Monopoly.