The starting point

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“Let’s start at the very beginning, a very good place to start…”

I thought it was important to take photos and videos before we did anything, so when we get completely bogged down mid-project and feel like it’s never going to end, we can look back and see how far we’ve come.  Thanks to our broadband speed it has taken nearly five hours to upload an 11-minute video(!) so here are a couple of films showing you the outside and the inside and I’ll try and go through the photos tomorrow.

So with apologies for my Blair Witch-style filming and dodgy commentary (I’ll get better, I hope!), welcome to Ethel’s House!

Outside:

Inside:

Get set and a half…

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A letter from my solicitor, enclosing a copy of the formal letter sent to the seller’s solicitor before Christmas and telling me that she’d heard from them to say that the transfer paperwork would hopefully be signed by the end of the week (i.e. Friday just gone).

I’ve emailed her to ask what hurdles we have left to jump – as far as I’m aware, it’s just registration of the crofts and entry of my name into the register as the crofter.  Time to start investigating my insurance options, which I think is going to be a whole post in its own right.

Get set…

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So I won’t be getting the keys for Christmas, but I’m a gigantic step closer – my solicitor has just emailed to say that the final query has been resolved and if I’m happy, then she is happy to issue the letter concluding missives.  (If you’re unfamiliar with the Scottish house-buying system, concluding missives means that you’ve bought it – you cannot now back out of the transaction without incurring very heavy financial penalties.)

All that needs to happen now is for the executor to sign the transfer paperwork and for the Crofting Commission to confirm acceptance of the transfer and put me on the Crofting Register as the tenant.  Hopefully we should be done and dusted some time next month and then the real work begins!

Ethel’s House is a Wreck of the Week!

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Wreck of the Week is one of my favourite blogs, so I was delighted to see that the most recent post was on Highland crofts and even more delighted to see that Ethel’s House was listed as one of Sue’s picks!  She’s obviously cleverer than I am, as she’s managed to extract the selling solicitor’s picture from the listing, so if you want to see what the outside currently looks like, go and have a look – and have a drool over the other five crofts as well :

My first tenants

by In Ethel's House, Projects Tagged , , , 2 Comments

sheep-161630_1280

I might not have quite bought the house yet, but my first tenants are arriving at the weekend!

As it’s a croft, I am required to carry out traditional crofting activities on the land and round here, you don’t get too much more traditional than keeping North Country Cheviot sheep.  I was planning to start towards the end of next summer by buying a small pen of ewe lambs at the annual sale, raising them for a year and then selling them as gimmers, ready to breed – my sheep advisers, who are kindly teaching me all about how to care for them properly, told me that it was a gentle way to start without having several weeks of getting up every few hours in the middle of the night for lambing.

However, a friend of mine is moving away to the other end of the country and can’t take her three pet sheep with her, so I said I’d look after them for her – they were bred in the village, so it seems kind of fitting that they stay here.  They’re coming to live in my fields until the purchase goes through (I’ve got a CPH number from when we kept pigs here, so it was just a question of ringing Animal Health and letting them know they were arriving – apparently I don’t need a flock number until I start producing lambs) and will then move to the new fields to eat them down once available (not that three sheep are going to make much of an impression on 9.75 acres, but I’m going to grow some of it on for hay anyway).

The countdown has begun

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I’ve had a letter from my solicitor!  It enclosed the reply from the seller’s solicitors, several maps and the entries from the Crofting Registers for the two crofts.  I’m not exactly certain why or how, but it seems that because the crofts are still held in Ethel’s name, it makes the paperwork an awful lot simpler and cuts out a lot of the waiting around for the Crofting Commission to approve things.  I think, although I may be wrong, that it essentially now treats me as if Ethel had nominated me to take over the tenancies.

Anyway, my solicitor has asked me to confirm that I’m happy with a few changes they’ve made to the clauses (things like the sellers not being able to warrant that the electricity works properly or there are no contaminants, because they’re the executors and haven’t lived there – usually in Scotland you have 2 weeks after the date of completion to report serious defects to the seller, this will essentially be cancelled) and as long as I am, then all I have to do is deposit the purchase price in my solicitor’s bank account and the other side will start the paperwork – my solicitor will hold the money in escrow until they’ve confirmed the transfer of the tenancies has been completed correctly.

So it’s SHOW ME THE MONEY!! time.  I am paying £95,000 for the two tenancies, so I’ve rung up the financial institution that runs the part of the family trust I’m borrowing the money from to see how much is in there.  This makes me sound like a total rich kid – I’m not, my father died when I was relatively young and his investments were put into a trust fund to provide an income for my mother for the rest of her life and capital growth for me and my half-brother to inherit after she dies.  For one reason or another, it’s split between two financial institutions and the bit I’m borrowing hasn’t been paying Mum an income for a number of years now, so my brother and I, as the trustees, decided that the trust would be better off loaning me the money to do this and I’ll pay Mum an income off it at a rate of base rate + 3%.

They told me that there was £91,500 in there and all we needed to do was write to them to confirm that we wanted to liquidate it (1% fee for liquidating it) and close the account.  They’ll also take a pro rata amount out for the quarterly management charge, so I’m expecting to get around £90,000 transferred into my bank account early next week, though this is a bank not renowned for its customer service skills, so I’m half-expecting it to go wrong somewhere!  The remaining £5,000 will either come out of my savings or Mum will add to it from her Premium Bonds so she gets the monthly amount she’s expecting in income.

Money, money, money…

by In Background, Finances Tagged , , , 2 Comments

ABBA had it right; it ain’t funny, especially when you’re trying to raise it against an unmortgageable property.

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I will hold my hands up here and say that I’ve been EXCEPTIONALLY lucky and am borrowing the money to buy the croft from family, although I’ll be paying interest on it at base rate plus 3%.  That covers the purchase price and my savings will cover the solicitors’ fees and some of the work that needs doing, but by no means all of it.

So what am I doing about the rest?  Well, it’s a bit of a risk and could all go horribly wrong, but I have a clean credit record and four credit cards with high limits that keep sending me 0% cash and balance transfer offers.  So I’m planning to put the work on the cards and hope that I can get it done up and the issue that prevents the house being mortgageable sorted before the 0% period runs out, then apply for a mortgage to pay back the cards and the bulk of the family loan (although the family is happy to let the loan run for a while if mortgage rates start doing silly things).

As it happens, I had a bit of luck last week regarding finances.  I’m self-employed and one of the companies I freelance for offered me a guaranteed 20 hours a week.  Initially I was going to turn it down, as it’s less money than I usually charge per hour and they wanted me to work 6am until 10am every weekday.  Then I thought about it, decided that I was being a totally spoilt princess and if the universe was going to drop over half of what I need to earn each month into my lap in return for the alarm clock going off half an hour earlier than it does anyway for my husband to get up, it would be extremely ungracious of me to turn it down.  Guaranteed income means less time spent drumming up new business and these guys pay promptly and never need chasing.  The rest of what I need to earn each month will be easily covered by my other regular clients and shouldn’t take up more than 8-10 hours a week, meaning I’ll be able to block out periods of time to work on the house. I start tomorrow, wish me luck!

The first project – Ethel’s House

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Missives aren’t concluded, but there’s now a formal written acceptance of my offer on my solicitor’s desk, so unless something goes horribly wrong, I’ve bought a house!  It’s not actually called Ethel’s House, it’s number 156, but like so many houses in this village, it’s generally known by the name of its longest resident in living memory, so Ethel’s House it is.  From the agent’s blurb:

This traditional 1 and ½ storey croft house which requires internal restoration is set in an area of true space and openness. The house was built in approximately 1920 and has panoramic sea views. On the ground floor is an entrance hallway, a living room, kitchen and bathroom and on the upper floor a landing and three bedrooms thus making it an ideal family home or fabulous holiday retreat. The house is mostly double glazed  and has the original v lining through the whole of the upstairs. There are stone built outbuildings which were formerly barns and stables also included in the sale and these offer various conversion options. There are areas of garden ground to the front, rear and side of the house. The house is heated with oil fired radiators and there is also an open fire in the living room.

The agents took the picture of it straight on and full frame (it’s on one of these rotating image things and even looking at the page source, I can’t track down the url for the original image, sadly), so it looks rather grey and sad.  I prefer this picture of it from the day the Google Street View car came past (yes, I can’t believe they made it this far north either!), because it shows a little of the amazing views the house has:

156 Armadale

What I’m buying, technically, is the croft tenancy with all its improvements, one of which is the house.  The field on the right belongs to someone else; the house comes with three fields behind it, one down on the point (not down the track in the picture, there’s another track about 15 yards to the right) and then another croft at the other end of the village, next door but one to my house (I live in the white one in the picture below):

166 Armadale

As you can see, there are the remains of an old house on it (there’s actually another one on the other side as well if you look really closely) and we’re hoping that one day we’ll be able to build our dream house here – a few years of planning and saving to do first though.  This field is 5 acres and runs all the way down to beach level.

So, step one in this project (once I get the keys, obviously): get Ethel’s House sorted out and ready to be lived in again.

Buying a croft

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When is a house not a house?  When it’s a croft.

Technically, when I say I’ve had an offer verbally accepted on a house, that’s not strictly true.  I am, in fact, buying two croft tenancies, one of which happens to have a house on it.  Many crofting tenants have bought out their tenancies and become owner-occupier crofters, these two still remain as tenancies and the house site has not been decrofted, so the Scottish Ministers own the land and, assuming that I’m considered a suitable person to be assigned the tenancies, I will have to pay them rent for the crofts until I can buy them out.  The buy-out figure is usually 15 times the annual tenancy (which will not be huge – to give you an idea, the 3.12 acres that go with the house we currently live in was bought out by the previous owner for under £100) but once you’ve become an owner-occupier, if you sell the land on within ten years (recently increased from five years), you have to pay half the difference between the amount you paid and the current value back to the landlord.

It’s all a bit of a legal minefield and having a solicitor who understands crofting law is absolutely essential.  The formal offer that went in for these two tenancies ran to 23 clauses on top of the Scottish Standard Clauses and includes things that wouldn’t have crossed my mind, such as ensuring the crofts are sold “together with the whole permanent improvements, including the dwellinghouse” (it would be a shame to pay all that money and find they’ve bulldozed the place…), that “it is an essential condition of this offer that the Crofting Commission consents to the assignation of the tenancies” (it would also be a shame to pay all that money and not be able to do anything with the place) and various other clauses that ensure I don’t get stuck with any very large bills or long-lost claimants to the tenancies popping out of the woodwork.

The other big stumbling block is because the purchaser of the tenancies doesn’t own the ground the house sits on, it’s completely unmortgageable.  Even the bridging loan companies I rang wouldn’t touch it (not enough equity in our current house to back it up).  One absolute right a crofting tenant has, however, is to buy the house site from the landlord and have it decrofted – usually an area of 0.2-0.5 acres is permitted to be taken out of crofting tenure to give some garden space as well.  This then makes the house suitable for mortgage lending purposes. I’ll talk about finances in another post – I will be completely transparent about money on this blog – but I’m in the very fortunate position of being able to borrow money from family to make the initial purchase, on which we’ve agreed I’ll pay interest of Bank of England base rate plus 3%.

One of the conditions of the Crofting Commission thinking me a suitable person to be assigned the tenancies is that I work the crofts.  So I’m not only taking on a renovation project, I’m taking on just under 10 acres of fields, which means I’m going to be learning to keep sheep and make hay as well.  Never a dull moment!