fixer upper

[BoL]

Moving house this month, just a 10 minute walk down the road. It's not this one:

https://bannermanburke.co.uk/property/cavers-hawick/

Talk about a fixer upper. Works out to about $450K USD/EUR. About 600 square metres of room and 18 acres.

Decent project for those with some spare collateral!

[Rupert]

Looks cheap
The house is almost thrown in for free with the land 18 acres £5k per acre up there? Except I bet its building land... lots of little holiday cottages. No, log cabins....

[BoL]

>cheap

Definitely, it's a couple of towns South of me but the prices there are about 50% cheaper than here (there's a uni and railway station here, the town near it never quite recovered from textile/electronic redundancies in the 90s when China and the like were viable)

Would say prices in the area are generally 50% cheaper than SE England.

Lots of these kinds of Victorian era properties are halved or quartered into flats.

Reckon you'd need at least the asking price in refurbishments but it'd be a beauty. Not quite sure where I'd put the hot tub given all that land

When I was buying I'd viewed a few and they were getting sold before I could put a bid in. Average time on market during COVID is 11 days. Apparently a lot of English folk (and Edinburgh) looking to move to somewhere more remote, and with cash.

[ergophobe]

It's a shame that a beautiful building like that would be allowed to descend to such a state. I wonder if it would be cheaper to start over rather than refurbish at this point.

Still, looks like a marvelous estate if you had the cash.

[BoL]

It is beautiful, probably too big for my imagination on how to use the rooms effectively, given I'm a family of 3.

Would prefer getting a smaller property with similar land. Had designs on buying acres and just sticking a forest on it given the money. This one just caught my eye for the potential and price. If I had a million quid it would be tempting...

[ergophobe]

Agreed. It makes more sense as offices for a foundation or a retreat center or something like that than a family house. Could be a beautiful retreat center though.

[buckworks]

It might also make a splendid bed-and-breakfast inn.

One would need staff to manage a property like that, though; it would be too big an undertaking for today's nuclear family.

[ergophobe]

>>bed-and-breakfast inn

I had that thought too. I'm more the roughing it sort and all but one of my best vacations have involved camping (US, France) or not quite camping by sleeping on floors and in hay lofts and such in Nepal. The exception? I just felt more relaxed than ever at this place

https://www.loughinaghlodgehotel.ie/en/

If I were rich, I would take a month every year to ship a trunk of books there and spend a month going for walks and sitting by the peat fire reading (though looking, I realize we were there for the most expensive part of the year). My recollection was that there was no internet and always a peat fire burning in the lounge.