House overlooking a graveyard. Would you buy?

[StarintheMorning]

Looking at a house in a lovely village. It hasn’t sold and now seems to be v good value, although it needs a fair bit of work. The only reason we can see for it not selling is that it is almost on a graveyard.

The church is beautiful Grade 1 listed, the churchyard is very well looked after. There is a small path between the house and the graveyard, which goes to the front door of the house. The church is right across the other side of the churchyard, although obviously the bells will be loud on a Sunday morning, but we have lived close to church bells before and loved it.

We would like it be our forever home, but there is a small possibility that we will need to move at retirement and I don’t want to buy something that will be difficult to sell.

As my son said, the neighbours will be quiet!

@My0My it's the church that's listed, not the house!

I would. Dead quiet (see what I did there?) and no chance of it being devoped

@spidey as I said a couple of posts before yours, the graveyard next to my mum’s house is being built on. They got permission to move the graves (can’t remember where) because they had no living direct relatives (two generations). It was very disrespectful. Thankfully they’ve run out of money for the moment, and it’s not the bit next to mum’s house.

Chancel repair doesn't apply if you buy the house now. If you'd been living in the house before the legislation was brought in then you would. This came.up when we sold our last house (next to a church) and we pointed out to the solicitor who raised the query that it wasn't relevant because of X and Y. Note, never hire that solicitor.

Apologies! I thought the house was listed too! In that case, the church and I imagine the churchyard too will stay unaltered.

Yes so long as it is not like this one in Edinburgh where the gravestones are built into the walls of the surrounding houses, very creepy...

I'd actively quite like it, but whether or not I'd buy it would depend on how long I thought I'd be staying there. If it's the foreseeable future then great, crack on. If it's 'we'll live there 5-10 years until the children are older and need more space/we get older and need somewhere that's less maintenance/we might need to move for work' then I wouldn't because it would put some people off and that might make it hard to sell. We sort of made that mistake with our current house - we love it and felt we were getting a bargain because its only downside is the parking and that was at the bottom of our list of priorities, but when we came to sell it it was a real problem (turns out that most people seem to see their house primarily as a place to keep their car, to my amazement) and I regretted picking something that was great for us but off-putting to a lot of people.

I couldn’t. I’d be forever thinking that I’d be in there myself one day.

We have a graveyard at the bottom of our garden in the house we are in now and have been here 26 years.