House buying hassles

[bam]

This is more of a vent than discussion so bear with me

On the day of my wedding last year (2nd August) we had an offer on a house we'd found accepted, having already accepted an offer on our own house. What a great way to start a marriage we thought, couple of months and we should be in a new house.
First off is the mortgage hassle, they say they're fine to lend us more to get the new house with, so we put the application in and it gets rejected, wtf?! First off they say that we failed the credit checks, cue some worried signing up for experian to check and no, no problems there at all, turns out they neglected to mention in the climate that they had reduced their maximum LTV and our application would have put us over, grrr, so instead we reapply to just move the mortgage to the new house and make up the rest with savings, you'd have thought this would be really really simple, same owed amount to a house that's worth more money, a no brainer surely. But because of their boneheadedness in rejecting our first application it has to go through all kinds of levels of approval before finally being granted, phew, back to buying the house.
Nothing at all is happening and no one knows why, this is October and we're going on our honeymoon in November, we really wanted to be in before we went away, but the vendor's solicitors will not respond to any questions from our solicitors, at all. We eventually here through his estate agent that they're waiting for some documentation from his mortgage company, this drags on and on, they get this statement, then suddenly it comes out that there is a 2nd secured loan on the house and the sale price won't cover it so the vendor will have to come to some arrangement with this company on how much, if any of the outstanding amount he'll pay, oh but then there's another problem, the guy was declared bankrupt 3 years ago and apparently his trustee in bankruptcy has to approve the sale too. We're coming up for Xmas now and still no resolution on these two matters.
Into the new year and the vendor's solicitors say they have everything they need and they'll fax it to ours, they say this for about a week and I guess it keeps vanishing into the magic fax blackhole
Last week we're told everything is ready, last pieces of paper have to be sent between his solicitor and ours, and we sent the deposit money to ours expecting to exchange Thursday, complete Friday.
Thursday comes a double whammy, there is no Energy Performance Certificate for the house and you can't exchange without one, a retarded scheme from the Government that means someone has to come round and saw whether or not you're using energy saving lightbulbs, how thick your loft insulation is, other inane crap like that that I really couldn't care less about. But the real killer is that apparently the company with the secured loan haven't actually come to an agreement on the sale after all and they're currently refusing to allow to go through. Oh and then today they claim to have lost the building regulations certificate for the garage conversion, but refuse to pay for the indemnity insurance so we have to cough up £50 for that, not a big deal just the principle...grrr

The most annoying thing is that this is the perfect house for us, it has the extra room we need now, with planning permission already in place to build two more double bedrooms, we could easily stay here for 10 years or more if we want to and there's nothing else like it on the market. Luckily our buyer is in the same situation in that for the work he does he needs to live in the area we're selling and there's nothing else available on the market.

So now we're just waiting for that phone call to say they've sorted this last thing out (assuming nothing else comes up) and we can get this finished off. It's been so frustrating as we've been expecting to move shortly since before xmas so have had most of our stuff already boxed up, right now I literally have two plates, and two cups out and no table to eat on.

edit: wow, that came out a lot longer than I expected and I cut out a whole load of other trivial annoyances too.