Dean and I still pinch ourselves of how much things have changed for us over the past few years.

Although I am currently a surveyor I was a former Estate Agent for many years, so I, like Dean, have seen hundreds of properties through work, I believe that we have a decent eye at making good decisions when buying a place, even if at the time it doesn’t seem like it.

Always a ‘plan B’

For us it’s easy, we have to love a property to make us excited and inevitably want to commit years of our life into transforming it into our home. However much we want to listen to our heart, we must listen to our head as well and there always needs to be a plan B. I will be honest we also have a plan C,D, E but that’s just because we like to feel safe in our heads. 

Thankfully we have never had to exercise our plan B’s but they are there in case that everything goes to pot, and we like to think that we make smart decisions in life, and work hard for them. However, life always wants to throw a curve ball at you and there are a lot of things that are out of our control and our Plan Bs are always… would the house be appealing to others if we had to sell it?

Luckily for us, our taste is quite universal, nothing outrageous to scare anyone away and nothing to ‘meh’ to not excite anyone.. or at least we like to think so… The Goldilocks of design, jussssst right ! Also spatial layout is key… we are titling this room as a bedroom but it could be a playroom for people with family or a games room for a couple. Kitchens and bathrooms are the rooms that daunt everyone so we always make sure there are enough of them and in the right positions. A little secret…. two years on and we are still ironing out the layout for the main house… I mean who needs a big house hey, we are struggling to title the rooms!

How did we end up with a property that NO ONE wanted to buy?

As we have been documenting our journey for over two years now, we get approached by many people asking ‘how did you find such an amazing place? I am so jealous, you are living my dream! ‘

We always respond the same, come and work on the estate for a week and it will quickly stop being your dream! - ha, jokes a side when this property came on the market no one wanted to buy it. Also I have to say, the dream totally is having a place like this and watching someone else do all the work…. so anyone that follows us on instagram… you are kind of half way there ha.

We found this while in Prague celebrating our anniversary (yes this was our life before the estate, an abundance of holidays and no commitment ahhh bliss!), a notification came on my email and it was from Rightmove Commercial. The estate agents were targeting developers for the conversion of the place into multiple units, however, financially it just did not stack up or at least no one could see through the ivy (I mean this figuratively as in reality you couldn’t). Also understandably its a niche market, its a big house with a lot of problems and in need of a lot of love… in we come!

The sales particulars only had two pictures, so it kind of ruined our weekend away because we didn’t shut up talking about what we thought might be inside. I don’t think we ever told this anyone but while in Prague we exchanged contracts on our home (meaning we sold it) and the same day the alert arrived… maybe it was fate, maybe not but that moment changed the course of our lives since.

Dean always the PRAGMATIC one!

We like to think our relationship works well because we have a Realist and an Optimist in our dynamic…. of course you can guess which one Dean is if you have watched any of our journey. Dean being the realistic person of the two, crunched numbers to see if it was feasible for us, while in the background I was Googling how to rescue a donkey and keep it within the gardens , I mean how much upkeep does a donkey need? …turns out more than I can give!

Dean said to me, lets have a look at the place first and we can talk about it then..

Property searching for us goes through three stringent tests.

• Test 1 - Is it within our price category and does it have good bones, what’s the layout of the place, any restrictions on us changing it. Can we make it work for us and is it affordable to make it into the home we want.

• Test 2 - Passing test 1 which is very rare, lets say 10-12 houses have only ever passed the first test. We then do an online dig. We find everything out. The past owners, the past planning applications. Who lives next door… you name it! If all is good here we will arrange a viewing.

• Test 3 - The final test is the nail in the coffin for us - or a positive turn of phrase, can’t think of one. We will visit the property. Every property we have ever visited we have placed an offer… yes I know we are an estate agents dream! In this day and age… everything you possibly need is online and you can find it all out… there are very few properties now that have not got any digital footprint.

Viewing the house

We viewed the house after it being one week on the market and we offered straight away, when you know, you know! As I said, as a former estate agent I know how fast people move when they see something that they want, so there is no point to play it “cool”!  Not in this property market.

We offered as much as we could, taking all the unknown factors into consideration. They didn’t come back to us for a month, within that time we were thinking, should we offer more, what if we don’t get it and what if someone else has beaten us to it. Luckily or not so luckily, we didn’t have any more money so we couldn’t do anything but wait. When we heard back from them, hearing the offer had been accepted we were like shoot! I bet we have offered too much! We were expecting a counter offer at the very least! The reality was that no one wanted to get near the place. We were the only ones that viewed it.

It was just so right for us, being a couple that do not know how to stay still this meant entertainment for years! The way we avoid overwhelming ourselves is to think in our heads lets divide this mammoth property into sections and work on one section at a time… Of course my donkey idea has not come to fruition yet, but never say never!

The House must sustain itself financially

Within our money crunching, working on the first cottage, The Caretakers Cottage was vital to be able to keep going on the journey. Most ask how we decided on where to start, it was simple, we needed to rent something out to get more money. In our heads the Caretakers Cottage is the most detached element to the estate and it worked perfectly for that.

Sharing our journey on Social media, we started to get lots of people asking if they could come and stay, which suddenly made our plan shift… "‘what if instead of long term we made it short term lets?’ That would be so perfect as we can still keep control of everything enabling us to keep everything as we like it… at its best!

In addition to all of this we could close the rentals for periods of time to do heavy, noisy work on the estate or just to have it all to ourselves if family came from Spain! Which if money was no object would have always been the Plan A.

Would you Sell to us?

Recently we got approached by someone wanting to ‘take the property off our hands” which we politely declined but made us very proud to think that, although we hope we never have to exercise Plan B, we know that we must be doing something right for others to be interested, and we know that we have that option open for us if life makes a detour, which we all knows happens sometimes.

The Rental

We have loved letting out the Caretakers Cottage and meeting a whole host of new people, something we never thought we would be doing. It also has allowed for others to enjoy our hard work and everyone that has stayed has been so respectful of that.

We made the decision a few weeks back that we would close the rentals over the winter so we can focus on the house. We will re-open it in the spring 2022 just in time for the tulips… it will be the first season people will get to see the tulips in real life as we have been in lockdown for the first two…. No pressure tulips but you need to be amazing next year!

Thank you to the first visitors that came to stay, and here’s to many more in the new year. As much as we love this house, its just too big to keep just for ourselves.