We would like to sell our house. It is rather a special one.
We tried to sell it last year, using an estate agent. We are putting it back on sale this year, with a different estate agent, who seems very impressed with how special this house is. I can tell you who they are, if you ask me…
Would you like a nice view? Like this?
You don’t actually need to be a lottery winner, really. You could be a creative couple who want to move from somewhere very expensive in a city to somewhere rural. The house is on a small estate, but it is not like the other twelve houses inside. Or in its garden.
There’s a well regarded builder in this part of Wales, who sells houses “off plan”, so you get to watch them being built for you, and you can customise them, a lot. The normal houses here are four bedroom dormer bungalows. This one has only two bedrooms, with the other two left open and used as our study. There are custom made book-cases that we can’t take with us, with drawers and cupboards underneath, and a big table for computers, art work, and similar things. This would be lovely for people working from home, or anyone who wants a good space for their hobbies.
Technology
The house is connected directly to the internet by Gigabit optical fibre, and we don’t have to rely on wifi (although we have it for the things with no Ethernet socket) as there are Ethernet cables to most rooms. The cables end in the study, and you can easily obtain an Ethernet switch to put there to connect it all up.
There are 13 solar panels on the roof, although three of them need new optimisers.
In the garage, there’s a battery system that charges on cheap rate electricity during the night, and outputs it during the day.
There’s also an electric vehicle charger in the garage.
Bungalow?
In principle, the house is a dormer bungalow. But it’s built on a slope, and one of the options we had was to have a cellar room underneath it. So, this is one of the world’s very small number of three storey bungalows. Here’s a picture of the cellar room, which we use as a gymnasium, and a guest room when the rare visitors stay. On the left, stairs up to the ground floor. The far door leads to the sauna room, which also has a shower and toilet. As well as being part of the sauna fun, the shower is also very useful when we bring the dogs home covered in mud. The shelves on the right are now gone, and the room has been repainted in a slightly lighter yellow.
Outside that patio door, there is a Jacuzzi hot tub, currently about a year old. We do rather enjoy our little luxuries.
The garden is unusual. We don’t like mowing lawns, so there aren’t any. At the front of the house is a very low maintenance Japanese-style garden. The neighbouring house is unable to look into our lounge window, because I planted a row of proper poplar trees to shield us. There’s a rowan tree which provides berries for birds, and supposedly scares off witches. I haven’t seen any, so it must work.
In the back garden, we have a nice big shed, with electrical power supplied. And we have a greenhouse, which I have grown amazingly tasty tomatoes and other lovely things in. There’s a barbecue area with a pergola over it. The barbecue is one of those big concrete ones, and the cracks in the back of it don’t seem to be getting any worse – it hasn’t fallen down. It has solar powered lights on the pergola, in case you are still eating after it has gone dark.
Three grape vines are growing up the pergola, and we had our first grapes last year. There’s a fruit cage, because the blackbirds kept eating our fruit. Home grown blueberries are so very much better than those tough things the supermarkets sell. The blackcurrant bush provides the best jam I ever tasted. Other features of the garden include apple trees, a fig tree, three raised beds for vegetables, and much more.
To be continued…