Serious Planning

Having failed in out first effort to acquire a property for conversion, we got organised. Shortly after getting back down south, we got our current property valued. This was rather lower than we had hoped; we took a long hard look and realised that, after 22 years, it had got a bit tatty. So we started a significant refresh – increasing the value/saleability by a modest amount would make a lot of difference.

We did some sums, looking at house value, savings and future income. We concluded that we should be able to…

• Find a property
• Raise a mortgage on our current property, a mere four years after paying off the last one.
• Buy our bit of Scotland and start converting, using savings and what time we could, until Andy retired in 2019.
• Sell up and move north permanently, paying off the mortgage and have enough capital to complete the conversion.

This will fly if we have made the right assumptions about the conversion costs. We digested the classics of self-building – the Housebuilders Bible and Building Your Own Home, we looked up sample project plans, bills of materials and likely costs. Provided we do as much as we can ourselves and live in a caravan until we get it finished, we should be OK.

I contacted Barclays, who we had our previous mortgage with. They made positive noises and told us to contact them when we found a property.

Meanwhile we went back to the ASPC website and extracted a proper long-list of likely properties. We ranked them in order of what was most important for us – 1) affordability, 2) minimum distance from family, 3) a larger property and 4) a large plot of land. With a few hours work, the long-list became a short-list and we started looking.

To speed things up, we persuaded Jill’s sister, Vicki, to look at the ones at the top of our list. Our top entry, Upper Middleton of Balquhain, not far from Inverurie, turned out to be quite unsuitable – it was small and appeared to have very messy neighbours.

Second, Greenlands Steading, looked promising but was sold quickly.

Third, Old Mill of Clinterty, turned out to be mostly new build and was not in a brilliant location – messy industrial units close by and too close to very busy back roads.

Fourth, Blackburn Parish Church, which had loads of potential, but very little land. It was taken off the market shortly after.

This leaves only a small number of likely prospects for when we head up over Christmas.