A little history

We moved “North” from Yorkshire just a year ago with the aim of a more relaxed life.

We both work from home so provided we can get internet, mobile phone reception and an airport not too distant then our location doesn’t really matter.

We were supposed to “try it out” for 6 months in a rented property and then buy our own house but... the financial system decided to crash, mortgages became difficult, people stopped putting houses up for sale.

As we are both self employed the mortgage companies moved the goalposts overnight and we were left without any mortgage and the earliest we could reapply was September 2009, and there was just one lender who would consider us.  This is despite us being self employed for over 15 years but our recent change in address and change in business name resulted in causing them problems.

So we waited and then started looking again.

 

We eventually found the right house, got the mortgage agreed and approved, got the valuation agreed, so we made the offer.  Only to find the seller had accepted another offer just the day before!!

Aarrgghh.

 

After that everything we saw got compared with this house and nothing measured up.

 

We then looked at a renovation project and after some discussion decided it would be a worthwhile project. So we called the agent to discover someone else had already paid for their own survey and they were preparing their offer.  No point spending money to compete with someone else who was a lot further down the road than us.

 

In the meantime there was a noticeable increase in properties being sold in the areas we were looking at and as we moved towards December the right property at our price just wasn’t appearing on the market.  Prices also seemed to stabilise and actually seem to creep up slightly.

 

So we started to look at building our own house. Something we had discussed before but wasn’t high on the agenda.  Now we started looking for a building plot and after a few false starts we found Torroble.  A one acre site with outline planning permission overlooking the hills around Loch Shin and with a view of Loch Shin.  There are some existing farm buildings that could be demolished, converted to garage/workshop or possibly in the future a self catering cottage.

 

So we jumped in and made an offer over the phone.  The agent called us back later that week and we “negotiated” a  deal based on the current owner not wanting to actually sell the land until April 2010.   That’s fine with us because it will take that long to get Planning permission sorted etc.

 

So that’s how we came to be here, going to build our own house, on our own plot of land, and not just buying an existing house.

 

Exciting ..Yes – Scary... most definitely!!!