To wonder how you came to live in a big character house

[Summerofloaf]

As in how did you afford it? What job do you do that enables you to live in a lovely big character house with big gardens?
Did you inherit? Work from scratch?

How? (Doesn’t anyone else wonder this?)

We are both high earners. It is my dream house. We took out a huge mortgage to get it (so the hands trembled a bit as we signed the documents) which we have since paid off.

Nowadays: Inheritance.

20 years ago it was possible to buy a big run-down house and do it up. Now the run-down house would be several hundred thousand pounds before you even start doing it up.

Got mine at a property auction. 5 bed detached house on 2 acres with a river running through the boundary. However..... It is in a rural village in SW Scotland.... Cant have it all but I'm happy

100% pure good fortune. Inheritance and bought at the right time. I’m not someone who was ever particularly motivated by money (having grown up with it, but miserably) and I work in a very averagely paid public sector role, so it’s not been down to any particular effort on my part!

Choose a different area!

www.rightmove.co.uk/property-for-sale/property-70811803.html

Flipping heck! Interesting. Scotland is too cold though.

No I don’t live round there just like the areas and the sound of ‘Crowsborough’. One of my parents does live not far from there.

I think its a combination of inheritance, hard work (saving and doing up houses) and meeting a spouse with at least equal assets. Then when you combine assets you can get a decent sized house.

I think there's quite a big gap between 'how did you do this?' and 'how do I do that?' in most cases, OP, sadly - because most of the answers to the first question are 'get on the property ladder 30 years ago'.

I was thinking this recently, that most of my school friends do jobs that are as or more relatively well paid than their parents, but that none of them live in houses anything like their parents did at the same age. Most of them don't live in houses at all, in fact, they live in flats.

Similarly, if you look around my area (ex council estate in SE, 30 minutes commute to London) you realise how drastically prices have gone up and so how much who can afford those houses has changed - all the people who have lived here 20 years are on one low wage for the whole household, we've just sold our house for £280k to people who - like us - are a dual income professional couple. DH is a teacher and lots of the teachers in their 50s at his work live in lovely houses that are now worth £700k+ - of course they didn't pay anything like that for them - and some of them might be fairly described as large period homes, but they owned those by 35, and none of the 35 year olds at DH's work live in houses that look anything like that, they live in houses like ours that DH's older colleagues wouldn't have touched with a barge pole.

All this is a very long way of saying that it's not just a trick you can replicate because for a lot of people the big trick was 'be born in the 1960s'!

Got mine at a property auction. 5 bed detached house on 2 acres with a river running through the boundary. However..... It is in a rural village in SW Scotland.... Cant have it all but I'm happy

Sounds bloody fabulous, just wish Scotland was warmer!

I agree with @LisaSimpsonsbff, I work in the public sector & most of my colleagues are older than me. They all have homes local to our office which would now sell for 1.4m plus & lots also have holiday homes, and good pensions. All afforded on very normal salaries, you would need 2 6 figure salaries for that now as a minimum.

Partly luck because we bought a modest house back in 2002 and then sold it for nearly double less than two years later, so hugely increased our buying power. It allowed us to buy a rundown but big, five double bedroom detached Victorian house in a very good area. Then we could afford to slowly renovate it because DH is the commercial director of a very successful property company and earns £100k+ and we get all our work done at trade prices

And it's that classic adage that 'money makes money' because we are now in the position to help buy our DCs first houses for them and get them rundown houses but in good areas, and get them also renovated at trade costs.

I live in a Grade 2 listed Georgian house. 4 bedrooms. Decent sized garden surrounded by high walls. It’s not huge, but it’s a nice size and we aren’t overlooked at all.

We’re in Scotland though, so house prices are lower here. We’re not near a city. It depends on where you live.

It’s our 3rd house. First, we bought a 3 bed victorian house for 3 times our salary, sold up for a 4 bed new build (5 times our salary), then sold up for this house, which was the same price. It’s been a money pit and living here stresses me out. I would like to downsize. There’s so much more to life than living in a big house.

However, I have been so grateful for the garden since lockdown. We are exceptionally lucky to have plenty of space.

1. Buying it in a really really bad state (as in, not safely habitable.. but we lived in it because we couldn't afford not to ).

2. going without to funnel cash into its development. As in, no holidays ever since we bought it. No takeaway coffee, we take a flask and homemade sandwiches out for the day. Wearing clothes and shoes until they're literally falling apart. Cut our own hair. Really basic stuff that people take for granted, we don't buy. TV licence, nope, don't have TV. Don't have a landline. No mobile contracts. And so on.

3. doing a lot of the work ourselves, where safe, and partly even when it's not. I've learned a lot about tools and trades along the way and our work is "good enough" but I won't pretend we often want to and that's not to belittle properly qualified people. Sometimes e.g. fixing the boiler had come from a lot of reading and then getting a plumber to sign off at the end so it's safe. If I had more cash I wouldn't have tackled some dangerous stuff, would never recommend it. Or stuff that's easy to cause massive damage.

Those 3 really!

Forgot to add.. it's nearly broken us at various times over the years. When something big goes wrong. But 95% of the time it's lovely and worth it.

I’m a Londoner and anyone with a house like that has got serious, serious money.

onthemarket that is an amazing chain of events. Thanks for detailing appreciate the name change.

CanIGoHomeNowPlease no not local to Crowborough. Chickens, veggie patch, you are living the dream!

My parent's place is a grade-2 listed Georgian place, 4-bed detached and decent garden but nowhere near as big as some of those posted on this thread.

Both have decent jobs, but my mum (now the higher earner) was part-time when they bought it 20 years ago and it took around 2 years for it to be in a decent state - the previous owners had seriously neglected it, rampant damp and almost falling apart. We're also in the Midlands so a cheaper area to buy in - the places you posted in the SE are pricey due to location, not just quality!

I agree with @LisaSimpsonsbff. DH does essentially the same job as his dad did. His parents live in a large, detached house with an acre or so of land, DH and his brother went to private school and his mum never worked. We live in a detached house in a 70s estate, occasionally consider private school and then do the maths and realise it's unaffordable ... and I work in a well paid job.
The difference? House prices.

Moved in to my absolute dream house before the lockdown in Feb.
It's huge - and zone 3 London, four floors and Victorian in a conservation area.
We bought it in sept 2019 and lived in rental while we did it up. This is the second house we have bought on a private sale. Both times we were very specific on where we wanted to live and wrote letters to houses we liked the look at. This one was in absolutely terrible state - very few people would have even set foot in it if they didn't do renovations for a living and most people thought we were mad!

We are high earners, who bought young and inherited some money when my mother died. That said, husband likely to lose job in pandemic so we are going to have to cut back significantly to keep it

Basically I bought at the right time and let booming house prices increase my equity enough to allow me to slide into any decent property I want to 👍🏼

Agree that @LisaSimpsonsbff nailed it above.

I live on a street of Victorian terraces in London (nice houses, but a far cry from the large character house you're talking about). The older residents all had jobs like teaching / admin / something artsy - often with just one earner or one full time and one part time. The young families buying these houses over the past decade have had to find £1.2m - £1.4m, so in almost every case, both parents work full time and at least one if not both of them in demanding city careers.

You need a time machine, a large inheritance or ideally both.

Each had our own houses when we met. Cheap part of the country. House was cheap for a reason (former care home, structural and title problems, solicitor advised us to walk away). We have lodgers to balance the books.

I moved from a large 5 bed in a private rd to a semi to clear the mortgage. Although it was an amazing house, every penny went into maintenance and there was always something needing money spent on. Only afforded it as we moved out from London in the first place.
I decided life was too short and moved to a house which was cheap to maintain so we can have clothes, amazing holidays etc. You need a good income to maintain such a dream house. I wouldn’t have missed it at all if there hadn’t have been a lockdown... first time I miss the huge garden!

OP for us the honest answer is this.

Saw the potential through the nonsense and the decor.

Worked bloody bloody hard through some hard times. Unemployment and maternity leave hit when we’d just doubled our mortgage and cleared out our savings to nothing to move. Other unemployment bouts followed over the years.

We were prepared to be in it for the long term . Didn’t expect everything to be there instantly, expected to have to work towards it. Did a lot of the work ourselves and learned new skills as we went along. Husband who wasn’t handy learned to fit a new kitchen and loads of new skills because he knew I wanted to live in this house, I did tons of work and sourcing materials too, managed everything, a career and a child while he was abroad all week, every week for several decades.

Lived in a building site for a couple of decades. Extended it sympathetically.

Did a lot of the work ourselves.

Multiple bouts of unemployment, and interest rates shot up to 15% at one point.

Guess we’re just a pair of those lucky, entitled baby boomers. 🤷‍♀️😉

Inheritance helped us buy first flat. Done up and sold that and another house. Have a good job. Everything needs doing on this house though so is going to cost us a fortune!

It's all about timing,having stable high(ish)salaries so you are offered good mortgages;bought our London home in RBKC '04 with a 90% mortgage,did a reno on it, now worth x4 what we paid. Husband kept his London bachelor pad, we acquired another flat so have 2 BTL sources of income. Then recently bought our country pad, period lodge property & 5 acres in Sussex;I'm SAHM exmedic, husband is lawyer in big city firm v good salary. I never pay full price for anything, always looking for discounts. True what they say, look after the pennies and the pounds will look after themselves.