Painting the house

Magnus has arrived (and been presented with a lemon cake to fuel him for the week) and the exterior is being totally transformed – it’s been power-washed to take all the dirt and lichen off and now the paint is going on.  I suspect he’s teasing me by leaving the front until last, because I can’t WAIT to see what it looks like finished!  Here are some pictures from Tuesday evening – he’s been back today, but the light was gone by the time I’d finished feeding the sheep.

156-armadale-outside-42 156-armadale-outside-41 156-armadale-outside-40

David called today to see if he could bring the kitchen over tomorrow, so Mick took all the remaining paint down the road this evening and my first job tomorrow morning is to clear as much floor space in our annexe as possible.  We have four base units (one of them a corner unit) and five wall units to fit in, plus a lot of worktop surface, so it’s going to be tight, but there’s a big pile of boxes I should be able to fit upstairs and I hope we’ll get it all in okay.  He’s going to be carrying on with the framing on Monday and Tuesday and says Dougie will try to be there one of those days as well.

Finally,hello to anyone reading from Wreck of the Week where Sue has put up a post about a pair of cottages I spotted that I thought she might like and kindly linked to this blog.  She’s a must-read for anyone looking for their own renovation project!

More auction browsing

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!

Auction browsing

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