When Sandy and I first decided to move to The Western Isles it was very much Location Location Location and the house could have been almost any tumble down place as long as it was in the right place. Last Tuesday I spent a very pleasant afternoon with The Soaplady and hers is very definitely the right place, no wonder she fell in love with it ten years ago - but I digress. After Sandy’s brother died last year and her mum came to live with us Location Location Location has become much less of a consideration and the most important criteria became Separation Separation Separation! She is such a nightmare to be around that we had to find a house which could be physically separated so that we could live in one half and she could live in the other and we could get our lives back - and we had to find it as quickly as possible. That was part of the plan when I went up to Stornoway last week and - what do you know - I found a house that will work perfectly on the very first day (same day as I found the rented place).
I’d seen this particular house on the internet a while back and it looked as if it might work but there was no floor plan so I needed to see it. It’s not the house we would have chosen for ourselves and it’s not in the area we would have chosen but getting our lives back has become the most overriding consideration and we have to compromise. What the house does have is two huge bedrooms downstairs, one of which becomes a sitting room, plus two other rooms that I can turn into a bathroom and kitchen. One simple door installed at the back of the stairs shuts off the whole of this part of the house and we can then begin to live our lives again without the constant misery that greets us everyday. I can even put in a separate external entrance door round the side and patio doors and a sun deck at the rear. She then gets a completely self contained home that is better than the one she left with the comfort of knowing that help, if required, is just beyond a door. Sounds a bit unkind but only those who have had the experience can truly judge.
The rest of the house, though not ideal, is fine for us for the next few years and we can add value to it by modernising it throughout. When the time comes we will sell it for more than we are paying and then move to Uig or Westside and buy the house we really want.
For most people it would be a pretty decent house and it has some reasonable views from some windows
The view from the kitchen with a perfect spot to park the camper
From what would be the guest bedroom
Surely room for few chickens there?
There you go, the compromise house. We have put an offer in which we are told is acceptable so now just have to wait to see if all the finances tie up and it goes ahead. Early days yet but I might just have killed two birds with one stone on that brief visit to Stornoway.
If it does go ahead I know that I can turn a rather dated house into something much more modern and desirable and it should hold us in good stead while we wait to see if The Soaplady’s house comes up for sale!
Well this is something I’ve never done before - blogging as a traveller! Yes I know everybody does it but it’s new to me!
Right now I’m in The Kings Highway in Inverness surrounded by young folks with beautiful Scottish accents. It’s a Wetherspoons pub which means that the food is so-so, but it’s cheap and there’s free wifi. The alternative is to go back to the B&B and watch TV but there’s nothing on, I’ve checked online.
Left Stafford at 12:00 in sweltering heat - 26 degrees C inside the house and hotter outside! Sandy drove me to the station (once she could stand the heat of the steering wheel) and I then took a sweltering train ride to Birmingham International for the airport. Then a Flybe prop to Inverness where the glorious Scottish wind finally cooled things down! Nice little plane journey - I’ve never been on a small plane before - made even better by having nobody sitting next to me. Come on! Are you really going to find 78 people who want to fly to Inverness on a Sunday! Had to wait almost an hour for a bus from the Airport and then had a right miserable git of a bus driver. I asked him to let me know when I arrived at the stop I wanted but, even though I got up and went to the front where I thought I wanted to get off, the sod drove straight past and right into Inverness. Not a great problem as it was only a ten minute walk to the B&B but not my usual experience of Scottish hospitality.
Tomorrow morning I get a bus at 08:10 (early breakfast!) to Ullapool to catch the ferry to Stornoway. Already booked the ticket which is £5 all the way so I was a bit startled to be charged £3 for the six miles from the airport. Takes an hour and twenty minutes which is not too bad especially compared to almost three and a half hours on the ferry.
Now you may be wondering why I didn’t take the easy option and fly to Stornoway. 130 quid, that’s why. Even with paying £36 for a B&B in Inverness it’s that much cheaper to come the long way. There’s also an added bonus that I can get to Stornoway tomorrow lunchtime whereas the flights to Stornoway don’t get me in till after all the estate agents have shut.
Don’t know if I’ll get a wifi connection over the next few days - Stornoway library maybe?
Well, we’ve booked our tickets to see Runrig at the HebCelt Festival in Stornoway on 17th July so we’ll be in Lewis this year as planned.
What we don’t know is whether we’ll be popping down the road for the gig or whether it will involve a 1,000 mile round trip. Somehow I suspect it will be the latter.
Getting rather sick now of being nice to people who have no intention, or means, of buying the house.
Sadly it’s a bit too early but this looks like a great place to rent for our first year on Lewis. Funnily enough we looked at this property (from the road) when we were up there in 2005. It had been converted and was for sale but didn’t look as good as this. The new owner has made a pretty good job of it. Maybe it will be let on just a one year lease and will be back on the market by the time we want it!
Talking about houses, the one I mentioned in an earlier blog that was put on the market at a ridiculous ‘offers over £135,000′ had its price reduced a week later to ‘offers in the region of £125,000′. Either the vendor reigned in the estate agent or the the other way round. Whichever, sense seems to have prevailed over greed.
When we were in (on?) Lewis in June 2005 we took a look at some of the houses that were for sale and one we particularly liked the look of was this one at Skigersta (typical Hebridean weather!).
It was on the market at the time for offers over £75,000 and sold four months later for £80,000. Now, a fraction over 3 years later, it’s back on the market at an astonishing ‘offers over £135,000′!
If we accept what’s being fed to us that house prices have dropped by 15% in the past year that means that the asking price of this particular house doubled in just two years. It’s not as though it was a wreck that has been done up because it was in ‘walk in’ condition when we saw it in 2005. That’s simply ridiculous and does nobody on Lewis any good except, maybe, the person who bought it. Even then, if they were local they will hardly benefit because they are going to have to pay a ridiculously inflated price for whatever they move into. On the other hand if it was bought by someone off-island as a speculative investment they have, indeed, made a healthy profit (assuming it sells). They probably don’t give a stuff about making it impossible for native islanders to buy a house of their own. It’s just money, money, money!
A few months earlier we were staying in a self-catering cottage in Cnip (actually one half of a house). The lady who owned it (who had lived there since she was married and whose husband’s family had farmed the croft since the 1850’s) was bemoaning the fact that another house in the township (of which there are only 15 houses) had recently been sold for £115,000, a sum that had most local people amazed and saddened. She felt (rightly) that such figures would drive away the youth of the area who could never afford a house at that price. In the event the sale fell through but the house was sold a few months later for £138,000! Within six weeks it had been given a lick of white paint and was put back on the market at £200,000. That’s disgraceful. I am sure that it must have been bought by an off-island speculator who knew nothing and cared nothing about the local people. Luckily it seems that it did not sell and whoever bought it still owns it. They were probably hanging on waiting for the next house price explosion. Serves them right! I hope they lose money.
In my opinion houses should be bought and sold for someone to live in, not as investments or money-grabbing opportunities. That’s part of the reason why so many folk are in dire straits now. I don’t feel at all sorry for those who have lost out in their attempts to make money but I do care about young people and locals who will now probably never be able to buy a house of their own.
If you want to check how the prices have risen in your area a good site for Scotland and the Islands is nethouseprices. You just need to enter a postcode and you will get (actual) local sales prices for the past couple of years.
