OUR RENOVATION JOURNEY : WE BOUGHT A 1930'S HOUSE; AKA 'THE RAT HOUSE'
/We bought a 1930’s house aka ‘Rat House’
Our new ‘Rat’ House - A 1930’s detached house in Hertfordshire.
Let’s recap. In May 2019 we had accepted an offer on our house after having it on the market for a couple of months and the search was now on to find our next home. The thing about the UK property market is you can’t really look at houses until you’ve sold yours. Well, not properly anyways. Some estate agents might let you make an appointment to view, but others, the ones with much more common sense, won’t let you view unless you have your property firmly on the market and ideally SOLD ( not including first time buyers). I get it, but it’s tough as it’s a big catch twenty-two scenario, because who in their right mind would sell their home without finding something else to buy? What if you accept an offer, but can’t find anything else? How long will a buyer wait? The answer to that question I have found is… Not very long.
Now we were “sold” we were viewing houses every weekend in an area which we had pinpointed as our dream location. The problem with our dream location was that it only had approximately twelve roads to choose from which sounds like a lot. But when you realise that at least six of these roads have houses which are way above your budget it swiftly brings you back down to earth. The competition was fierce too, with estate agents telling us that couples had “moved into rented” in order to make them more desirable vs us in a chain. The area we wanted was a hot spot for great schools, and we would bump into the same families viewing house after house, all desperate to send our children to the local primary school.
Our budget wasn’t great either for what we wanted. You see, in my head I’m Beyoncé and I want one of those Instagram houses with a huge kitchen island, state-of-the-art appliances and smart home technology. I wanted a huge garden for Otis to play in and a dressing room for my clothes (note how I actually put my sons needs ahead of mine). But the reality was we didn’t have the budget for anything like this in the area which we wanted to be in.
I was on maternity leave, due to be returning to work after a year off any day now, and the prospect of finding a home was starting to stress me out.
Then one day walking back from a baby class whilst pushing Otis in the buggy, I got chatting to a fellow new mum friend who had recently moved into her new home, in the same area that we wanted to buy in, and if by magic she mentioned that the run down ‘rat house’ (her words not mine) across the road from her was going on the market today.
Interesting I thought, it’s probably out of our budget. It was everything we were looking for, it was detached – which wasn’t even in our criteria as we thought detached houses really were only for Beyoncé. It was double fronted.. again, very Bey; it had a huge garden and had the potential to turn into a beautiful family home.
I called the estate agent immediately. I was greeted with a less than friendly voice on the other end who stated that the house was already sold to a developer and that it wasn’t ‘mortgageable’ for me to buy, and that I would need to pay cash. But how can it be sold already I asked? You only photographed it yesterday? There was no sign of it online, no marketing on right move, no advertising on their website, not even a floor plan with square footage for me show you now. I pleaded with them to be to be shown around. They humoured me and sent this man boy in a tracksuit from the local office to show us around.
I knew it was a bit of a shit tip inside, but come on pal you’re meant to be selling me a house not something out the back of your car, and the irony is the name of the estate agents was the one that makes suits *wink (Rhymes with Sailors) * anyway, moving on…
We took my dad who isn’t a builder, but he’s one of those blokes who thinks they know everything about building work. We also took a real builder who thankfully did know a thing or two about houses, and we even got a visit from the local undercover police who wanted to know what we and the man-boy in a tracksuit were doing inside this derelict house at 11am on a Friday morning.
But none of this drama put us off, we were in love. It had a hallway big enough to fit at least three buggies in (this was important to me for when friends visit with their babes), two large reception rooms and the world’s worst kitchen. Not just because it was tiny. It was so tiny but it also looked like someone had been murdered in it and had some new form of bacteria festering around the hobs, and dog poop under the counter where small rodents were running around.
The price was great, so surely it was too good to be true. Or maybe no one in their right mind would take on such a project. We offered asking price within an hour of viewing and were told it would be passed on. The following day someone new from the estate agents rang and asked us to get our sealed bid in by midday on Monday. I asked if our offer had been declined? No answer. “Best offer by Monday, ok?”. No, not really. What was going on. I smelt a rat, or perhaps I still had one on the bottom of my trainer. It was gross inside and still full of the previous owners’ contents and his dogs’ shit all over the place.
Worried we were going to lose it we managed to get hold of a neighbour who knew the vendor (Thank you kind Mum friend, I honestly believe the fate of our friendship had everything to do with this story). We managed to get hold of the vendor and asked if he had received our offer. “What offer? It’s not had any viewings yet” he replied.
To cut a long story short, although this story is already quite long (and probably boring to most) , we ended up buying the house directly from the vendor which I reckon you probably already guessed by the title of this blog post. I’m not sure what the estate agents were playing at, well I do, I’m guessing it something to do with a large brown envelope of cash on their desk each month, but it would seem they had undervalued the property deliberately to sell onto a developer, who in return would do it up and re sell it on, aka ‘flipping it’. Making them double commission.
We ended up paying 20% more than the original asking price as we felt it was worth that, and we weren’t in it to make money. We just wanted this amazing, smelly, beautiful house as it had bags of potential and we also didn’t want to see someone be ripped off, nor see this lovely house potentially be knocked down.
I’d love to say that was the end of all the drama, and although as I said we did end up buying it, we did face a couple more hurdles after the blip with the estate agent.
The mortgage. Oh yes, remember that thing you need to actually buy a house if you’re not Alan Sugar. The first lender that came out to value the ‘rat’ house wouldn’t loan on it as there was an offending tree in the garden. Never mind the fact that there wasn’t even running water and there had clearly been a fire in the hallway. The tree in the garden was the biggest issue.
We had to instruct a structural engineer to do a structural survey, which ended up costing us £600 to tell us what we already knew, and that it was in fact structurally sound. Even my dad could tell it was structurally sound. Just kidding, he had no idea.
This was all before we had even signed the dotted line. Before ratty house was actually ours.
We completed on the purchase of ‘rat house’ in the October of 2019, and we completed on our sale in the September of 2019. The one-month gap was a right ball ache and set us back a month on doing anything to it, it also added an extra month to all our belongings in storage. But Rat house was now ours.
We just had to figure out what to do first, and also find somewhere else to live, as the inside wasn’t very habitable.. unless you like poop and small rodents.
So let me introduce to you our beautiful old girl ’Rat House’. Our detached, double fronted, slightly girthy but not very deep 1930’s house in Hertfordshire.
The photos were taken in two stages…
Stage 1. When we first completed on it- still with all the previous owners belongings in.
(We bought it like this to help hurry up the sale as the previous owner didn’t want to clear it)
Stage 2. Once we had cleared it.
