So we saw a house last night that we quite liked. It was a mid-terraced house closer to my sister-and-brother in law, closer to my friends, closer to the school we'd like to send the nipper to, and closer to a more fun and up and coming area of London - back towards Colindale basically.
Currently we are in Queensbury, which is dead - grubby, downtrodden, smashed glass everywhere, drunks near the tube station all the time, just generally not as nice. We're in a 3 bed semi-detached on a main road, about a minute away from the tube station.
You know the drill - two biggish rooms, and one tiny box room. So not only is the area boring and lifeless and old, but it's also pretty loud and annoying. Plenty of obnoxious things going on that just piss you off and grind you down little by little. Boy racers bombing around the streets every night, horns and cars blaring away. But.... the flipside of that is, I can make as much guitar noise as I want. Literally no-one cares. Not even the neighbour. In fact they told me to make as much noise as I want.
Our garden is a bit small, and we're sort of triangled in with three neighbours. So you never really feel a sense of privacy in there.
So the potential new house....
The house is in a small quiet road. It's mid-terraced. Brick walls. It's ex-RAF, and needs some work. It has a garage at the front of the house that joins another garage, but is not joined on the other side. It's 5m x 2.5m, so probably big enough for a home studio room. The three bedrooms in the house are all big. Two doubles, and one large single, which with a bit of knocking out of a non-structural wall, could be another double easily. There are also a few other opportunities for knocking out non-structural walls to create a nice open plan space. There is no door into the garage from inside the house, so one would need to be added, and the old door bricked up. Probably needs one or two skylights adding to it as well in order to let in some natural light.
It has a bigger garden, and it's more secluded. But it's on a bit of a hill, which is a little weird.
It doesn't have any central heating. It has those old warm-air-vent systems, which would need to be ripped out and replaced. The ground subfloors are concrete. But in general, it's in good condition. Just needs some amount of modernisation.
It's a much larger house. The current one is 74sqM. The potential new one is 123sqM.
I guess I'm starting this thread to ask for advice and kick around ideas. We've only been in Queensbury a year, but I'm kinda done with it already. Wanna be out and into a home that we can call a proper family home. I prefer the area we used to live and wish we'd never moved, but you take your chances and you take your risks.
Also financially... does it make sense to sell a typical 3-bed semi in favour of a 3-bed mid-terrace that eventually could be a 4 bed, with a bit of work.
I think we can afford to sell our current one and move into that one, all whilst only porting out existing mortgage, which the bank says we can do. But I'm not sure right now what money we'd have left over for improvements.
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"Also financially... does it make sense to sell a typical 3-bed semi in favour of a 3-bed mid-terrace that eventually could be a 4 bed, with a bit of work."
Maybe.
Depends on how you do it.
Our 3 bedroom terrace in Acton went back up for sale after being renovated by the owner.
We had renovated it to a point, enough to sell and make a profit on.
They turned it into an amazing family home, did the loft, went out the back and to the side downstairs.
It was seriously impressive work they did but I did a back of the fag packet calculation and I struggle to see they would have made any money at all doing that.
You can easily overcapitalise on properties.
Is that a problem?
Well if you want a family home to live in for 10+ years then it doesn't matter.
Capital growth will likely outstrip any expense.
Personally I'd get to the outskirts of London, get some nice scenery, less stress.
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We lived in a house (that we really liked) for a very long time with a neighbor that went out of his way to cause as much stress as possible. We only stayed there as long as we did to make sure we could afford school fees, fancy cars and 2-3 holidays a year without ever having to give a second thought about affording it.
When the school fees ended we moved within 18 months (it took us that long to find the house we wanted) and withing 2 months we were berating ourselves for not having moved 10 years earlier and modifying our lifestyle it made that much of a difference to us.
So long story short, feeling happy in your house is probably more important than many things.
Ex-RAF to me means that if you want to put skylights in the garage you'll need an asbestos survey, and they'll probably find some that will cost a fair bit to remove (non-london prices could be £5k)
Otherwise sounds like a much bigger space with lots of potential
I'm guessing the London property market is the same as other parts of the country about which I know more - ie, there's a dearth of properties for sale, and anything that does appear is snapped up quickly. That makes it easier for you to sell, but will limit your choice of what to buy. Having recently moved once, with all the costs and upheaval, that's makes a move now riskier, just because you might end up compromising and taking something that you wouldn't otherwise consider, just because there's nothing else available.
But .... how much time do you spend at home vs visiting your sister/brother in law? There are other schools in other parts of the country (not Cornwall!) and your money will go a lot further outside the M25. If you move somewhere bigger/nicer, they might spend more time visiting you instead. You might even make new friends ...
(OK, forget that last bit!)
I say go for it. Sounds like you want to. You will forever wish you had if you don't.
Actually Colindale isn't that great, maybe don't get too close.
I did a gig in Ludlow years ago and outside the venue was a grafitto saying "Colin was here", which was the most Ludlow thing it was possible to say I thought.
For small amounts of asbestos cement board (but not blue or brown asbestos) the council might collect it for free if you remove and double bag it appropriately (I know Belfast city council do this).
The main issue is, in that area of London you've got a few options....
- Loads of flats. That come with ground rent and services charges, which was part of the reason we moved from the flat in the first place.
- A fair few brick mid-terraced houses.
- A scant amount of end-terrace houses.
- A scant amount of semi-detached, and those typically lie in the range of £540k-600k, which is outside of our budget.
- Quite a lot of wooden timber houses which are hard to get mortgages on, and hard to sell when the time comes too.
What we're looking at effectively:
- We can sell our current house for £515K
- We can buy for £425-500K
- After accounting for all costs, we'd have £20K to do the new house up. Which becomes more or less realistic, based on the condition it's in.
We saw a big mid-terraced the other week. We could've got it for £395K. But it had a lot of issues - first of it, it absolutely stank of fags, and sweat, and dirty clothes, could've been a body underneath all the trash we saw for all I know. It had a flat roof, with signs of water damage internally, and once you extended out the dining room area and made the kitchen all sexy and open plan and what not, you've basically lost half the garden at that point. It was a stones throw from the school, and close to mates and family and all that. But the amount of work it needed just really put us off. Probably 4 months for the extension, and a few months on top for redoing the bathroom, the electrics, etc etc etc.
If it had been an end-terrace, probably would've gone for it.