So many projects, so little time…

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There are so many amazing places for sale around here at the moment that I’d love to dive into, but all my cash is currently tied up, so for the moment I can only drool over them from the sidelines. Here are a few that have caught my eye recently.

St Anns, Cromarty

This is a house with presence.

It’s B-listed, Georgian, 4 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, plus a separate two-storey west wing and a separate bakehouse, neither of which are currently in use. Plus period features coming out of your ears – 12-pane Georgian sash windows, shutters, fireplaces, take your pick…

Offers over £435,000 with Galbraith: https://www.galbraithgroup.com/property/inv210029-st-anns-church-street-cromarty-iv11-8xa

Milton Villa, Pittenweem

Out of my area, this is near my brother-in-law, and sold very quickly. Usually you see churches that get converted into a house, this is a house that got converted into a church.

Downstairs is a bit open plan.

But still the odd feature fireplace and door dotted around the place.

Again, late Georgian and listed, it was on the market for offers over £400,000 and I suspect will have gone for a fairly substantial amount over that. More pictures here: https://www.zoopla.co.uk/for-sale/details/59867469

Balnakeil Manse, Balnakeil

Now this one IS in my area and I’m totally heartbroken that someone else gets the joy of doing it. Eight bedrooms, if you count the attic rooms, two kitchens and 1.8 acres, tucked away behind the Balnakeil Craft Village, this is going to make a gem of a B&B for someone.

Albeit after a huge amount of work.
It was on at offers over £250,000 and the home report said it wasn’t mortgageable due to condition, so someone with pretty deep pockets has snapped this up. Again, more pictures here: https://www.rightmove.co.uk/properties/113563511

Some potential renovation projects

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One of my worst faults is that I have a constantly roving eye for a house in need of a bit of TLC.  Here are a few that have caught my attention recently, though they’re all either sold or probably will be before long!

The Old Schoolhouse, Halkirk

Lovely traditional house in Halkirk, packed with period features – just look at this staircase!

Formerly inhabited by a heavy smoker, this would need stripping right back.

It’s got damp issues and I’d want to get a loo/shower room in downstairs somewhere (possibly by taking a bit off the dining room), but this house has amazing bones and has an enormous back garden that could potentially provide a plot to build another house on.  Was on at offers over £115,000, went to fixed price £103,000 and is currently under offer.

St Andrews Church, Thurso

Pete tells me I am not allowed to buy this until I am making more money than God.

The roof is shot and has been for years and a lot of the glass is broken.  But what’s left is beautiful.

And yet again, a wonderful staircase.

I think it would make a fantastic space to show off the area’s artists and craftspeople – turn the downstairs into cubicled work areas for creatives, turn the upstairs into a gallery/showroom to sell their wares. Downsides are the lack of parking and the fact that just sorting out the roof is going to run into six figures.  Also B-listed.  Currently under offer for the third or fourth time at £50,000.

Adastra, Wick

This is a former drill hall, used by the Territorial Army from 1890 to 2018.  Gorgeous proportions.

Lovely old stone floor and upstairs, the drill hall and those amazing windows.

It has three entrances at the front and looks from the floorplan like it would split vertically into three houses fairly easily.  The problem is that they’d be pretty big family-sized homes and there’s no garden.  Currently on at a fixed price of £120,000, down from its initial asking price of offers over £150,000.

I have a load more I’m keeping my eye on, but that’s probably enough for this evening, I’ll save the rest for another day.

Things I’ve been drooling at

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Not a lot of house progress to report (I’ll try and get the pictures off my phone later on this week), so since I haven’t done one of these for a while, here are a few places that have caught my eye recently.

Seaglass, Whitsand Bay

Couldn’t be much further away (it’s in Cornwall), but it has views to die for, plus its own hot tub and helicopter landing pad.  Only three rooms (bedroom, living area/kitchen and bathroom), but manages £120,000 a year in bookings as a holiday let.  Originally up for sale at £850,000 when I first spotted it back in June, it’s now down to £699,000.  https://www.onthemarket.com/details/4718836/

Point Clair House, Loch Ness

Slightly closer to home and also currently being run as a holiday let, Point Clair House was built in the 1930s by a ship’s captain (spot the nautical influences in those curved windows) and sits on a peninsular into Loch Ness.  It comes with about 3.5 acres of grounds, with planning permission to build another two 3-bedroom houses.  £795,000.

Howietoun Fishery, Stirlingshire

This is an unusual one and it only came up on my radar today when I was looking for something else.  It would be an utter nightmare to develop, with 4 A-listed buildings on it and a B-listed grain mill, which of course means that I really want to do it!  My favourite building, by far, is the summerhouse in the middle of one of the ponds.  At 27 acres, this could be a really beautiful set of holiday cottages and £225,000 seems very reasonable for something only 4 miles outside Stirling.

 

Getting down to business

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Still no news here on when I’ll complete on the croft purchase.  I can’t even get hold of my solicitor at the moment to find out what the delay is!

In the meantime, if anyone fancies going into business up here on the north coast, there are a couple of opportunities coming up in the auctions.

The Schoolhouse restaurant at John o’Groats has been closed for a while now, but as you can see from old Trip Advisor reviews, it was well-loved.

john o'groats - schoolhouse restaurant

It has a guide price of £80,000, a considerable drop from the offers over £145,000 DM Hall had it listed at when it first came up for sale.  John o’Groats has gone through a lot of changes over the past few years, with Natural Retreats coming in and restoring the main hotel and building eco-lodges, so it could be a good opportunity for someone to revive the restaurant again.

If cooking isn’t your thing, how about a spot of retailing? Two shop units that are usable as one shop with a guide of £55,000.

thurso - shop

I have a funny feeling I may have mentioned this in an auction post before, but hey ho.  This, along with the unit to its right as you look at it, used to be one of those rummage-y shops that did a little bit of everything, though it leaned more towards DIY stuff.  It’s a bit off the main drag, but fine for a destination shop and there’s plenty of free parking nearby.

Right house, wrong place

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Sorry for the radio silence this week, but there’s been no news here on the house front – so this post is going to be a bit of a blast from the past.

When I was going through the auction listings last weekend, I noticed a few for sale in Lybster and that reminded me of the house we nearly bought there.  Originally our plan wasn’t to move up straight away, it was to have a project/holiday house that we could work on over the years and then hopefully take early retirement to.  The one we nearly bought was called Kirkstyle House in a small village called Lybster on the east coast of Caithness.

Unfortunately I’ve deleted all the pictures I had of it when we went to view it, back in 2007, but trust me, it didn’t look anywhere near as up-together and well-finished as it does here:
Kirkstyle House

That long room on the end used to be the village bakery and in the main part of the house there are four bedrooms, a good-sized living room and kitchen and a bathroom (I think the current owners have added an en-suite to one of the bedrooms, as I don’t remember being there originally).  It was on the market for £75,000 and we got all the way to putting in a formal offer, subject to mortgage valuation survey.  In the end, the surveyor decided there was an issue over something (I can’t even remember what, it might have been the roof), put a £20k retention on the valuation and we didn’t have enough cash to make up the difference.  Thank goodness.

Because someone did come along and buy it and did it up absolutely beautifully and stuck it back on the market several years ago.  It’s still for sale.  Let me stress here, if the people who own it ever read this – I think they’ve done an amazing job with the house, the interiors are completely unrecognisable from when I saw it.  It’s just that Lybster is an awkward place to live.  It’s about 13 miles south of Wick and I don’t think the bus service is that regular, so you need to drive if you want to commute to work in Wick.  It’s just that bit too far to be a comfortable commute to Thurso, let alone Dounreay, though I think people do.  And while Lybster is a lovely place to have a holiday in (indeed, Kirkstyle is also available as a holiday cottage here), it’s a tricky place to sell a house in, especially when other sellers in the local market are slashing their prices.  Compare £155,000 for Kirkstyle with a guide price of £175,000 for this 8-bed country house nearby:

Reisgill

Or a guide of just £67,000 for a 4-bed end of terrace:

Averon, Lybster

What the village really needs in order to thrive again, in my opinion, is for the hotel to re-open and, after a series of leaseholders opening and closing it, the hotel company has put it on the market for £350,000:

Portland Arms, Lybster

It used to be a really great place to go for lunch and hosted some of the best weddings in the county, hopefully someone will buy it and turn it into a thriving business once again.

UPDATE APRIL 2016:  Kirkstyle sold for the asking price earlier this month and the hotel reopened at the end of March.  Here’s to a bright future for Lybster!

More auction properties

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So, with the best part of £100,000 burning a hole in my bank account, it’s probably not the safest time for me to be browsing the Scottish property auctions, but sometimes I like to live dangerously 😉

A bit out of my area, but still in the Highlands, is this 3.5 hectare site with a former military bunker/command centre in Poolewe.

poolewe-bunker

It’s got lapsed planning permission for four villas (Scottish for detached house) and has a guide price of £100,000 – but not one if you don’t like midges, its position on the west coast practically guarantees clouds of them in the right weather!

The Flotta cottage from August is back in, at a slightly increased guide of £20,000, as is the Wick shop with a slightly reduced guide of £36,000.

 

More auction browsing

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So I’m still waiting to hear whether I’m actually buying this croft or not (I’m sure everything will go through fine, I just get twitchy when everything goes quiet!).  In an effort to distract myself, I’ve found another Scottish auction catalogue to browse through.  This time it’s Auction House Scotland, with everything below going under the hammer on 8th October.

This first one is out of my area, being down in Argyll & Bute, but I’ve lusted after it before in an auction catalogue, so I’m going to include it here anyway.

dalmally - badnaiska house

8 bedrooms on the banks of Loch Awe, though if you look at the additional pictures on S1homes, there’s a road between it and the water.  Just the kind of thing I’d really love to get my teeth into – I hope whoever buys it restores it rather than pulling it down.  Guide price £140,000-£160,000.

This next one is also out of area, but I was intrigued by the idea of buying a car-parking space.

paisley - car park

It’s in Paisley and from reading the blurb the idea seems to be that it’s not for personal use (although you can), but is more like a buy-to-let in that the car park management lease it out for you.  Guide price of £12,000 for a five-year lease.

Finally, one a bit more local to me (‘local’ being only 70 miles away).  One feature of Highland addresses is that addresses can be a little misleading – for example, the official second line of my address is ‘Thurso’, which I always change to ‘Near Thurso’, on the grounds that if you drive to Thurso to try and find my house, you’re 26 miles away and in a different county.  In the same vein, Wester Achnahanat Cottage is not that near Ardgay, it’s about equidistant between Bonar Bridge and Lairg, which means it has some cracking views.

ardgay - wester achnahanat cottage

Guide price of £50,000-£60,000, but I’m guessing it’ll need a lot of work!

Finding a house

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House-hunting works a little bit differently up here in Scotland. For starters, we have fewer dedicated estate agents.  Most properties up here are sold via solicitors, most of which will have a dedicated estate agent in their office.

Up here on the north coast, I have a list of sites that I check on a regular basis for possible interesting new additions.

  1.  Rightmove
    Who doesn’t know Rightmove?  The problem here is that most local solicitors don’t use it.  However, for the ones that do, it has two very useful little tricks – firstly, I’ve got an RSS feed set up so that every time a new house within 40 miles of my postcode is listed on Rightmove, it pops up in my daily feedly.com blog feed.  Secondly, I’ve installed Property Bee.  If you’ve not come across Property Bee, it’s an add-on for Firefox that tracks changes to listings on Rightmove and a few other sites.  So when I look at Rightmove search results, this is what I see:Property Bee screenshot
    It shows me the date a Property Bee user first saw it and any changes to the listing or the price subsequently.  VERY useful!
  2. Caithness Solicitors Property Centre
    Or CSPC, to give it its shorter name.  Most areas of Scotland have one of these group websites, so there’s ASPC for Aberdeenshire, ESPC for Edinburgh, GSPC for Glasgow and so on.  However, CSPC is only used by two of the solicitors covering Caithness and Sutherland – Young Robertson and Georgesons.
  3. Highland Solicitors Property Centre
    HSPC covers the whole of the Highlands, including the Western Isles and Northern Isles.  It tends to be where solicitors outwith Caithness list properties they’re selling within the county and also shows anything the Highland Council is selling (which saves me a separate trip to the council website).
  4. Individual solicitors
    There are four other solicitors’ websites I check on a regular basis – Drever & Heddle, Pollards, Inksters and the local Re-max (okay, technically not a solicitor).
  5. Auctions
    I love auction catalogues!  There’ll usually be a handful of lots for sale up here each month.  I check SVA Property Auctions, Wilsons Auctions, Future Property Auctions and Auction House Scotland.

Are you in the process of finding a house in the Highlands?  Anywhere else I should be checking?  Let me know!

Auction browsing

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Saturday evening and time to have a look through the Scottish auction websites to see if there’s anything local (by which I mean north of Inverness).

SVA has a Grade B-listed building with permission for conversion to a 1-bed house in Tain:

tain - the red house 1

I do like the look of some of the period features:

tain - the red house 2

Wilsons has a 2-bed house in Castletown with a guide price of £35k against a home report valuation of £50k.  I’d possibly have a look at this if I was buying, but the lack of internal photos makes me slightly wary.

5 Churchill Place, Castletown

Going in the other direction, there’s a very pretty cottage on Flotta in the Orkney Islands with a guide price of just £16,500 at Future Property Auctions:

flotta - orback cottage

However, that looks like a pretty big farm next to it – I’d want to go and see exactly how close it is and what they’re farming (my guess would be cattle with a barn that size).

flotta - orback cottage aerial

They’ve also got a shop for sale in Wick – now this is an interesting one, because I know this shop pretty well. It used to be a craft shop, then got split into upstairs and downstairs units with a children’s clothing shop downstairs and a tack shop upstairs, both of which have now moved into bigger premises. Its problem is its location; it’s tucked away off the high street and although a destination shop will do just fine there, it doesn’t get much passing footfall:

wick - kirk lane

The interiors are nicely done though, and with a guide price of £38,000 I’d definitely be tempted if I wanted to go back into retailing:

wick - kirk lane interior