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.
Way back in 1976 I went for a nice bike ride with my then girlfriend starting at Wick going up to John O’Groats and then right along the North and West coasts of Scotland down to Glasgow (details of the trip can be found at www.bikeride.cankita.co.uk). Whilst cycling down the West Coast we would often glance over to the horizon in the west where some mysterious islands could be seen when the weather was fine. I knew they were The Outer Hebrides and I vowed one day that we would go there.
That ‘one day’ took almost thirty years to come about when, after many holidays in England, Scotland, Tenerife and Florida, I decided that the time had come to explore those mysterious islands. In April 2005 we hired a car, packed a couple of tents and Sandy, myself and our son, Sean, set off for a trip that would take us from the Butt of Lewis to Vatersay. After taking the ferry from Uig Bay to Tarbert we made our way to Stornoway and then on up to The Butt of Lewis where we camped for the first night. It’s a bit windy up there! We made our way down through Westside over to Uig and then down through Harris enjoying mostly good weather and then crossed to Berneray where we spent a great night beside the beach. The following day the storm came in and we saw nothing of North Uist and had to retreat to the Outdoor Centre at Lochmaddy where we had the place to ourselves for a couple of nights. We spent two days looking out of the window at the squalls across the nearby loch and ventured out only for food at the Lochmaddy Hotel - nearly losing the car door to the wind at one point! There was no way we could have camped.
After a couple of days the storm had lessened and we ventured onwards. We saw virtually nothing of North Uist and Benbecula but by the time we had reached South Uist the sun was shining again although the wind was still strong. We camped for a night near the beach at Howmore only to have the tent blow down in the middle of the night forcing us to retreat to the car for an uncomfortable night. On then down through South Uist and over to Barra and Vatersay in much better weather. We spent a couple of nights on a spit of land on Vatersay which overlooked Castlebay and watched the ferries and the Hebridean Princess come and go. On our final day we caught the ferry from Castlebay to Oban.
We had a couple of days that were truly awful, the tent had blown down and it was never easy to sleep with the wind constantly taering at the canvas but we had loved every single minute. What a superb place! We just had to come back.
It didn’t take long. Two months later, in June, Sandy and I hired a smaller car and booked a self-catering cottage in Cnip on Lewis - we had learned our lesson with the tent! Weatherwise it was a pretty poor week with every day bar one grey and drizzly and Mrs MacLennan, our host, would pop in each night and apologise for the weather. But we loved every single minute!
Back to the humdrum of every day life and Christmas 2005 came round. We did what we had done for the past ten years or so, had the family round and I cooked elaborate dinners for the whole ten days we were off. There was nothing wrong with it but something was stirring inside me. I realised that we might be doing the same thing for the rest of our lives. On New Years Day 2006 I suddenly made the decision that we would move to The Outer Hebrides. I told Sandy and she said ‘Great’. There was no need to talk any more about it but we had to plan it out. We still had a large mortgage on the house from having to re-mortgage about 10 years ago when the bank said ‘We want our money back’. There was no please about it, they would have taken the house in the blink of an eye. So we had to get the mortgage down as fast as we could as well as saving what we could to give us a start in our new life.We worked out that mid 2010 was the earliest we could make it and so the date was set. We would put the house on the market in early 2010, stick all the furniture on Ebay and then pack up our jobs at the end of July 2010. We would be in Lewis by my birthday on the 9th August.
From then on every day became simply a day to get done with and a day closer to our dream. We’ve had a few good times since 2006 but mostly every effort has been put towards reducing the mortgage and keeping the dream alive. The date is still firm although the current climate has made things much harder. Not only has the house gone down in value but Sandy works for Wedgwood (heard the news?) and interest rates mean that savings produce very little return. It’s going to be a lot tougher than we planned but whatever happens we will try our utmost to make the date and, whilst we will have far less money than we had hoped, we would rather be poor in the Outer Hebrides than well off where we are now.
So, you see, the counter is our lifeline, our spur to a better future. It’s now been 3 years and 13 days since we made the decision to move to The Hebrides and we hope to be there in 1 year 6 months and 23 days. Each day it seems like an eternity until it happens but when I look at the counter I can see that there is now much more behind us than there is to go.
Heard a small bang in my computer room yesterday afternoon and went in to find that the computer I use as a server had died and I had no internet access (panic!).
Took it apart and figured out that the power supply had blown so (praying that was all it was) I tripped down to PC World to get a new one. £26.97 and half an hour later I was up and running again. Now what I want to know is what happens when I get to Lewis and something blows up? Can’t order online with no internet access but I guess there must be a computer shop in Stornoway? What if it happens on a Sunday?
Guess I’ll be bringing a few spares with me!
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.
No sea view but I guess we could cope
