A little bit of Blighty
How do you choose a place to live when there are no particular boundaries to the search? We started by narrowing down the type of property we were looking for in areas where the prices were realistic, whilst being within the locations we felt were workable. For the property, we wanted a pretty blank canvas to start from scratch with the layout, how it was heated, the kitchens, bathrooms, decoration, etc. We were looking for a detached place outside of a larger town, with some land. The condition of the property was less important. Armed with a rough understanding of what was needed, we headed to the property websites and some more specialised auction places and started to view properties. We visited places in roughly a central strip of England, away from the more expensive counties of Oxfordshire or Hampshire but not going too far to the edges of the country. Some places we saw hadn’t been touched for decades like a very hidden cottage in Gloucestershire that looked like a Victorian villager might have read by candlelight in the living room. One farmhouse where the estate agent had stories of molten snake skins falling from the ceilings and a stone house in Derbyshire that had been part of a wildlife education centre that was now being renovated as 3 different dwellings.
Purchasing such properties often requires going through an auction and buying a house at auction is a white-knuckle ride. If you win the auction, you are at the “exchange” step of the process and have committed to complete the purchase within a short period, usually 4 weeks. It’s most likely that you’ll be buying the property with cash and you have to be confident there aren’t any gotchas that cause problems later. One auction required the full guide price amount to be deposited with the auctioneer beforehand to participate. It is slightly terrifying to do a bank transfer for several hundred thousand pounds on the off chance you’ll win and hope to get it back if you don’t! We did not win that one (but the money was safely returned!).
Another property at auction had very much spiked our interest. Located just outside a village in Staffordshire, on the edge of the Peak District. It had spectacular views, great south-facing land and a cottage in much need of love and attention. When looking around the property, another set of potential buyers were there at the same time and as they left remarked “you better have a bulldozer if you buy that place, it needs knocking down”. But we were smitten. The location was perfect set in rolling hills with a patchwork of greenery, the house certainly was a blank canvas but had so much potential and we got a strong feeling this could be the one.
We deliberated bidding at the auction for a long time but eventually chose not to as my house sale wasn’t quite over the line and there were a couple of niggles in the sale pack that we weren’t comfortable with. However, the lot did not make the reserve price so remained unsold at the auction. Our search continued but nothing came close to this place, which was still on the market. So we placed an offer we thought was acceptable, my house was sold and had closed off any of the other concerns. By the end of 2022, the house was ours. We picked the keys up on a snowy day just before Christmas.
View of the cottage on first say we visited as owners.
Now started the huge challenge of updating the place to be somewhere we could live. We enlisted an architect and as he described it, were now the proud owners of our very own bit of Blighty!
