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Interior Life of an Estate Agent - part 16

Everyone wants a bargain. Hell, I do. We’ve got a Victorian end-of-terrace house on at 220K, in need of renovation, and I expect to be killed in the rush. I rather fancy I may have a go at it myself; buy it, do it up and make a few grand.

I’m supposed to meet four parties at the place and we have instructions to go in through the back door because the front door doesn’t open. As I drive by I see a couple peering through the filthy front window so I hope they will find their way round to where I’ll be with the keys.

I find a second couple at the back of the house so the other two parties have looked and run away and, truth be told, it looks quite shocking. The thing to do is to look past the utter rankness of the external and try to visualize the finished project. So, brightly, we start climbing over bits of fallen, rusted iron guttering, all broken into short sections in the yard. The man is walking with a stick so I feel it is judicious to move aside some of these more obstructive pieces of metalwork but I have no secoteurs with which to cut back the self-seeded saplings that have sprung up.

Miss Havisham’s place had nothing on this beauty. We can’t see through the windows but there is a particularly attractive set of stained glass double doors leading to the yard and they are enough to excite me with ideas of rejuvenating the old place and making a feature of them, opening into a light-filled conservatory. I open the door and tiptoe in.

Every wall in the place is covered in blackened wallpaper that looks about fifty years old. The walls have been running damp for some time; possibly condensation, but it’s a ghastly sight. I make my way through the debris to the front door and try to open it, scaring the hell out of the couple out front who think there’s a ‘presence’ in the house that has come to lure them in. Once they come in round the back, we all creep around inside trying not to make contact with the doorframes, and with our bodies shrinking back from inadvertently touching the shredded and filthy curtains.

The front room is large and airy and, upstairs, the bedrooms are large; the front one filled with sunshine. This one room makes all of us start thinking about the possibilities. But, and it’s a huge but, the large cracks all around the ceiling and walls, upstairs and down, give away the sorry state of the gable end, which has slipped downwards about an inch by my reckoning.

Now, to you enthusiasts out there, this may not be such a problem. I have lived in a house older than this with a slipped gable end, which stayed slipped and slipped no more, but the question is whether this is a rebuild or a shoring up. The man with the walking stick bows out politely. The young, energetic couple who fancied a bit of painting and decorating and a new bathroom are fazed but not yet vanquished. Like me, they are smitten with the large rooms. What modern houses have such a luxury of space? And why the bloody hell don’t they?

My problem with this is, as always price. To shore up the gable end, re-roof, plumb, wire, centrally heat, re-plaster, fit kitchen and bathroom, and redecorate will cost anything from 75K upwards. Top price for this terrace is 299K. There’s no such thing as a bargain.

Addendum. The owner's taken this one off the market after over 200 viewings. It's left to rot.
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