To sell the house and drastically change our lives

[julyjulyjuly]

I’m in my 30s, married with one DC and live on the outskirts of London. DH and I are both self employed and whilst the year started off well, the lockdowns have been awful financially and have also taken a massive toll mentally on both of us.

We have a big mortgage (£1500 a month) which was doable before, but with things looking so much less certain due to Covid, we’d now like to hugely reduce our outgoings.

We’ve always wanted to live in the countryside and we’ve found a place we really like the look of. It’s a long way from London and is in bad condition inside - it would need a new kitchen and bathroom straightaway and all the other rooms need completely redecorating (paintwork, fixtures and floors). The garden is an overgrown mess.

DH and I have never done any painting, decorating or floor sanding in our lives and don’t know anything about that sort of stuff. But it’s always been a dream to take on a rural project like this, do as much of the work as possible by ourselves and create an amazing family home.

We could afford a “finished” house in the location where we want to live on our budget, but it would be two bedrooms as opposed to four, with one reception room compared to three. I’ve always wanted the big rambling house so we can have family to stay at Christmas and friends during the year. Obviously that wouldn’t be possible with a two bedroom cottage, but if we bought the house that needs work then we’d have that.

The major issue is the finances - whilst our mortgage would be reduced to around £600 per month (that’s the cost of the house plus £50k to do it up), we worry that moving hundreds of miles away from London is a risky move career-wise. In our current state we can work from anywhere, but what if our freelance work dries up and we need to get full time jobs again? This is something that would be much easier to do near London than the far flung but beautiful corner we want to move to.

I know I’ve probably answered my own question here, but is it too risky to take this step and rely on getting freelance work in the future to pay our bills? Is there any way at all we can make this work or is it a total pipe dream?

I just feel completely and utterly drained by this year, am craving a massive lifestyle change and feel like this is a now or never moment.

WWYD?

@ForTheLoveOfCatFood

I don’t think 50k is a realistic budget if you need a new kitchen and bathroom plus redecoration and doing the garden. It sounds like a nice idea but if your both working when will you have time to get the jobs done? If your bringing people in to do the work that will increase your costs

It would be OK for the kitchen, bathrooms, decorating etc but older houses have a habit of throwing up unexpected problems once you start disturbing things, a bit like working on an old car. If it's in a village get down to the pub and find out the local tradespeople, you'd be amazed at what you can save!

A lot of country houses that are cheap and large have really poor insulation and are run on oil which although prices are okay at the minute do mean that heating can be really expensive. Also damp, also in flood plains or with no chance of decent broadband, ever!

If your businesses can both be done from anywhere, I really think that staying in/near London is a waste of money. There are definitely plenty of remote jobs out there if needs be, and growing by the day.

Ps, our house has been an ongoing project for a decade now. We have a bedroom, bathroom and reception room that have no plaster, doors, or plumbing yet. We’ve had countless rows over it. It’s cold, dusty, a nightmare! But the rooms we have done are lovely and it’s in a gorgeous setting. Would I do it again? Yes. Definitely. (Although I’m not far away from family).

I'd it just a long way or a long journey there is a difference. OH works (in non covid times) in London 2 days a week sometimes we have lots of friends who do similar and we live near Newcastle. Hundreds of miles but under 3 hours on a train ...I think now more people are working from home this will become more common We have a 4 bed detached up here for the price of a 2 bed flat elsewhere so whilst the train isn't cheap it still is worth it!

We did that with a baby and it was hell. Never again.
Our house doesn't sound as "bad" as yours (needed new bathroom, all rooms nearly had to be gutted, garden was a mess and was way more expensive to fix than we thought). Kitchen is hideous but working so will have to do.
If you have no diy experience it's going to take twice as long and with a baby... we realised you couldn't do anywhere near as much - baby has to nap, eat, sleep... can't drill next to a napping baby.
I'd never ever do it again.

I'd say buy the finished 2 bed now and in a few years look for a project house!

"But our worry is that if our freelance work dries up, we may need to get back in the rat race and find jobs in central London again"

If your mortgage is £600 a month why would you need to work in central London?

Dh and I did it.

Best thing we ever did.

I would be super pragmatic about how much you would need to pay to actually buy it. We are currently trying to buy a big lovely detached house in the countryside. Our purchase on a house we loved fell through due to the first lockdown and it’s been an absolute nightmare trying to buy since.

Everything is selling for well over 10% above guide price. One house we offered went for at least 10% over and it wasn’t even mortgageable due to a planning issue. Just last we lost out on another. Our offer was about 12% over guide price. No idea what it ultimately went for but must have been at least £100k over guide price. It didn’t even had central heating and needed a lot of work as had been vacant for years.

Personally we live way out in the countryside and I still commute to London part of some weeks (not now) and it’s a lovely balance. But the market is awful right now so if you don’t have to move now, I’d wait until the spring.

Without having seen the house, you can't just glibly say, as a pp did, that 50k for a reno isn't enough. Could you rent, at your chosen destination and rent out your old home, to make sure the move is what you want?

I think people usually regret this and it also takes a toll on relationships. As PP's have said, if you've done something like it before it's one thing, but if you don't have much experience I think it'd be hardcore, and you'd probably also run way over budget.

@julyjulyjuly

Reading all the replies, my head says it’s far too much of a risk and could very easily go horribly wrong. I’m just so, so tired of city living, the pollution and living like sardines. And our current place is tiny - I want a romantic and rambling place where we can truly spread out!

Perhaps go mid-way for now - get the smaller property with little to no work to be done to it, then in 5 years time look again at buying a bigger property to renovate.

Right now it's really hard to get tradespeople to come out, some are shielding, some are over busy as everyone wants their house fixing/new office, and so you would have to be pretty happy to be flexible.

I don't quite see why you need 4 bed three reception or a two bed house- why not go a middle way and get a 3 bed house which needs less doing to it, but some renovations of a less structural nature, and see if you like that lifestyle on top of working. Somewhere you could build an extension/go into the roof if you needed to. Check if you actually like doing DIY all the time, and whether your marriage could stand it, we have come to blows over DIY more than anything else.

Are you escaping to the chateau OP?

Could you rent, at your chosen destination and rent out your old home, to make sure the move is what you want? This. Find out if you actually want to live in the area and if it’s possible work from there - then decide if you want to take on a massive (and expensive) renovation project. Lots of posters on here talking about regretting the things you don’t do - I think you could very well regret not doing this if you get halfway into your renovation project, find out you hate it/can’t afford it/can’t work from there and there’s no way back.

Could you renovate in stages? So if work dries up for a while you can pause the renovation?

Are you brave enough to post a photo of some of the rooms? 50k is very light.

£50k doesn't go very far in house renovations, especially if you don't know what you're doing.

DH and I are both self employed, and the way we have always thought is if the worst happens and we lost our company, could we afford our mortgage on two minimum wage jobs?" If the answer was no we waited and increased our deposit. I think from the perspective of your mortgage, I wouldn't worry about it at all, £600 is not that much to have to find and if you both lost your jobs you probably wouldn't be able to even rent much for that price.

I do think you should think carefully about taking on the scale of project though. I know other people have said it, but costs do tend to run over. Projects take a lot of time if you're doing them yourselves, will you want to work all week and then work all weekend painting and sanding etc too? It will probably take a few years before you were close to really feeling like it was "done" and it can be miserable living on what ends up feeling like a building site for a long time.

We overspent on our current house and still didn't manage to get it finished, we have work booked in for January now (moved in December last year), we've managed to save a bit up again but I'm absolutely sick of walking through a hallway that is totally undecorated with off cuts of carpets on the floor and wires sticking out of the walls everywhere!

However, all that being said, if I was you I would go for it

Also, what is the broadband like? We get Superfast broadband in our house (which is pretty much in a field on its own), but some local villages get about 1mbs on a good day with a fair wind.

While 50k is a smallish budget it is very doable if you can undertake most of the work yourself and focus on the kitchen and bathroom, as well as create some liveable spaces. You can get amazing designer-look bathroom suites on the internet, same for tiles and still make it look stylish if you can do the plumbing yourself. Ditto for kitchens. We took on a massive dilapidated heap and turned into a lovely home, spending in total not much more than your budget but we had more rooms. However, both DH and I can work remotely and do have a wide range of skills, including electrical wiring, welding, carpentry, plumbing, plastering, glazing etc. I personally plumbed wall-hanging toilets in rooms that had just a hole in the floor, plumbed in bath tubs, sinks and created a wet room. We installed underfloor heating in a building with no actual floors, just trampled earth, so had to cement in a vast area. Due to being so remote, it wasn’t possible to order a lorry with ready to pour cement, so we had to keep adding to a cement mixer, which is back-breaking work. Another reason why we could work with such a modest budget was due to the fact that we had a lot of expensive professional tools already, including a professional cement mixer, several drills, routers, electric tile cutter, various saws etc. Just did the sums for one of our large bathrooms that has a lovely boutique hotel style look, £150 for a wall-hung toilet with concealed cistern, £120 for matching wall-hung bidet £150 for amazing freestanding bath tub, two stylish sinks for £100, Concealed shower thermostat & massive overhead rainbow head hanging from ceiling & hand-held shower head for £200, hidden flush shower tray for wet-room style shower £150, gorgeous tiles for floor and walls £450, adding to that, timber, cement fibre boards, plaster boards, grout, cement, bathroom graded lighting, electrical cable, connectors, ceiling fan and other consumables, it came to just over two grand. We have a huge kitchen, we partially used IKEA carcasses and custom build other cupboards to fit the layout but cut and sprayed all the doors and drawer fronts. We build a huge kitchen island and poured/formed our own work surfaces with 8 invisible integrated induction cooking rings side by side. Without the new kitchen appliances, we spent just under 5 grand but you’d think it was a designer kitchen. We did splash our remaining budget on lovely new ovens, built-in bean to cup coffeemaker, dishwasher, fridge and freezer. However, without those skills and decent professional tools it might not be easy on such a budget. We have seen couples that ended up in massive debt and marriage in tatters as they underestimated the sheer scale of hard work and skills involved. It can all become quite expensive if you aren’t very practically minded. Not everyone can watch some YouTube videos and do the work themselves.

Also, plumbing, is it mains gas, lpg or oil? Oil boilers are more expensive to install, maintain and you have to supply your own tank.

We're several years into our second country house and both houses have cost more than £50k and looked in better condition than that.

Could you renovate in stages? So if work dries up for a while you can pause the renovation?

We could just close off the top floor for a few years and live downstairs, although that might be a little spooky.

Renting could be helpful, but it may be hard as we have pets. And if we did rent, we would lose out on this house!

why not go a middle way and get a 3 bed house which needs less doing to it

That’s the sensible option. I’ve just fallen in love with this particular house, but like a previous poster said, I think it might be a lot to do with the romance of the wreck. If the house was a man, it would be the devastatingly handsome bad boy who’s a whole lot of trouble but completely irresistible!

@OpEd I’m not sure - it has radiators (with pipes running over the walls) and what looks like a combi boiler in the kitchen.

Depending on the state of it, it’s entirely doable provided you don’t have to do everything at once. I’ve always bought ‘fixer uppers’ and have few DIY skills beyond basic painting and decorating. Provided the house is structurally solid (get a full structural survey) you can do most of it over time. I’ve been living in my current home for 11 years now. The previous owners had lived in it for 60 before that (bought it when they first married and it was sold after the wife died at 95). It was well kept but hadn’t been upgraded since the ‘50s. It wasn’t even plumbed for a washing machine. We got a washing machine and tolerated the grim kitchen for 3 years until we could afford to get the kitchen we wanted and did the bathroom at the same time. Most of it has been redecorated but the hall still needs done and the windows at the back of the house are still single glazed. It doesn’t matter to us but we live in the south east where it’s warmer and the original windows are really pretty, so I’m reluctant to get rid of them. So, unless it’s completely uninhabitable without renovations I’d be tempted to use the £50k to sort out the essentials, and then improve it bit by bit. The only other issue is that, if it’s as remote and i commutable as you say, will people want to come and visit you often?!