My wife and I have been looking to buy a new house for some time. We want to leave out 1.5 storey house and move into a single storey house. We have been on I don't know how many viewings and bid on three houses only to back out when the bidding rose above the point where we felt we were getting a good deal.
Eventually we found our dream house and said, 'This is the one we want and were going to make damn sure we get it whatever the cost'.
But then the bidding started and rose up about 30% above the asking price, so we eventually pulled out of that one too, which was a crushing blow. What we loved most about the house though was the layout. It was perfect with plenty of space, bedrooms away from the rest of the living area, semi-open planned, but with a gap between the kitchen and living room, so that you could cook without interfering with or being interfered by the TV.
Then we found another house with the exact same layout and going for a fraction of the asking price of the other. The catch is that it was un-renovated since it was built in 1977. This means that the bathrooms are in green porcelain and the kitchen cooker is built by ASEA and looks like the first cooker my parents had back in the 70s. This time we won the bidding and became the owners of a lump of coal destined to become a diamond.
So here’s the thing, can we fix up an old house and turn it into our dream home. From a cost point of view it seams like a good idea as after the house is fixed up we will only be paying for the true cost of a new house rather than bidding on a newly renovated house where the final price depends on how many people are interested during the bidding. Although I write about this now, we bought the house back in September, when prices were still high.
Have we made a good business move or condemned ourselves to the trouble and stress of fixing up a house whilst managing our jobs and two small kids? On the plus side much of the work we can pay somebody else to do, but there is still a lot of decorating for us to take care of.
My gut feeling is that we are doing the right thing, but only time will tell. We get the key in the beginning of the New Year so Christmas this year will be the calm before the storm!!!! We then have a couple of months before leaving this house to get the bulk of the restoration work done.
A sign of life
6 months ago
2 comments:
Hi Swenglishman,
Just wondering how it went with the house renovation? About to embark on a similar project myself and interested in other people's experiences. Since you haven't posted anything here for about a year though I'll not hold my breath...
Hi Simon. First of all the reason I have not blogged for a year is because I have been fixing up a house!
We started off by paying a company to replace the kitchen, bathroom and toilette. They also put in new water pipes, new ceiling and moved some walls and added others to change the internal layout.
We also got some decorators to wallpaper the bedrooms, so the house was we could move into the house after 6 weeks with not major disruptive building work to do. This was important as we have two small kids and I knew we would not cope without getting the key things fixed.
When the weather warmed up, we re-painted the house and replaced about a third of all the wooden panels on the facade. We also got all the windows changed to maintanance free PVC.
That took the whole summer! When the weather turned colder, we started wallpapering over all the 1970s brown walls (we gave them all a quick coat of white paint, just to brighten them up).
After nearly a year we are very happy. The extra money we put in to renovate still puts the house price in the range of what I would have paid for an unrenovated house (at least 18months ago anyway!). But we have a new kitchen, bathroom, windows and wallpaper.
The thing I think I got most right was to pay somebody to get the biggest jobs done BEFORE we moved in.
Good Luck !!!
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