Renovate or rent?

[GreenFloor]

Namechanged for this.

I'm going round in circles here and could do with some help.

To cut a long story short, bought house 3 years ago for what we thought were the right reasons but unfortunately it's turned out to be completely wrong for us. We put it back on the market 1 year after buying it but only had one fairly low offer that was bungled by the estate agents. Since then, nothing.

Everyday living in the house is a problem for many reasons, it's too big, too many stairs, not enough furniture, very difficult to clean properly, have to take the car every time we go anywhere...
We've estimated the work we need to do for the house to be manageable is £35,000 - we'd need a large bank loan. Doing the work in stages is a possibility but it would take about 4 years for us to pay for it ourselves, putting even more strain on an already strained relationship and business, as we need peace and quiet to work in, not constant disruption.

So, either we fork out thousands on renovating a house we'd rather not be living in, in an area we'd prefer not to be in, or we rent a smaller more manageable flat in the area we want to be in, and wait for this one to sell.

Any advice??

It sounds like you're keen to rent somewhere smaller and wait for the house to sell. If you can afford it, that's probably the best way to go for your business and relationship.

Is there a reason that your current house isn't selling? Could you put a link to it so that we could see and give some advice about how it appears?

If you don't have much furniture and are finding it difficult to keep clean, I wonder if the appearance is putting people off at the moment.

you can change the house but not the location, which you say is a sticking point. I wonder if you spend the 35k it may not actually change the way you feel about it. in which case you are back to square one - 35k worse off...

Yes grendelsmum, rent somewhere smaller and wait it out is basically what I want to do, it just seems a bit mad.

There's no picture I could put that would really give you an idea, and I'm a bit reluctant to post pictures on the net, but the main reasons why it isn't selling are:

1 - it's on four floors, two rooms on each floor, so lots of stairs.
2 - it has horrible green floor tiles on two of the floors.
3 - there is only one bathroom.
4 - the estate agents (all five of them!!)are totally useless (we are not in the UK)
5 - the local housing market is a) flooded with newbuilds and b) pretty dead atm.

The house is clean, several people have commented that it's a nice house (apart from the floor) it's just a huge effort to keep it that way.

Can't do anything about no. 1, but 2 and 3 will cost a lot of money to sort out. Have done all the window-dressing I can afford to do, now it's time to splash out if I want to make a difference. I just hate this living in limbo and not knowing what's going to happen.

Ah, I get the kind of house. Am I right in thinking that you're somewhere like Spain or Portugal with one of those traditional houses which you have to grow up in to love ?

Sod it, just lock the place up, put up the shutters, pop back once a month or so to check it over, and wait for things to pick up. I'm sure you're not the only one to be doing this.

I don't really think that green tiles actually stop people buying houses - that's just the reason people give when they're looking for a reason. It just hasn't been the right house for anyone looking, yet.

Close... Italy, in fact. It was only built in 1995 so it's certainly not traditional, but they build for aesthetic effect here, not for practicality, which means there are loads of houses that are just very hard to live in.
We've now found another estate agent who has a brain and appears willing to use it, so we'll give it another few months before packing it in and renting!!

Oh, that's great news!

How about you just tell all the Italians how stylish and glamourous the tiles are, and tell all the non-Italians that you could easily cover them up with engineered wood?