We would like to sell our house. It is rather a special one.
We tried to sell it last year, using an estate agent. They did exactly what all the estate agents do, put pictures and a brief description of the house on the various web sites people look at. Nothing more. And for that, if it had sold, they would have taken a percentage. We had two viewings in six months, and one of those was a notorious local time waster who has viewed every house in the area, and made absurdly low offers on all of them.
We need to find the right customer, actively, rather than relying on chance web site scrolling. We need a lottery winner. Not the ones who win a hundred million pounds, buy a castle, and employ loads of staff to run it for them. We need a lottery winner who just won a million pounds, and only wants to spend half of it on a nicer home. Or perhaps somebody retiring from an expensive city, who wants more house for less money.
Half a million pounds, or near offer, will get you something quite special.
Would you, dear lottery winner, 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, with drawers and cupboards underneath, and a big table for computers, art work, and similar things. This would be lovely for working from home, if you aren’t the lottery winner…
Technology
The house is connected directly to the internet by Gigabit optical fibre, and we don’t have to rely on wifi, as there are Ethernet cables to most rooms. The cables end in the study, and an Ethernet switch there will 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 partly use as a gymnasium. 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.
Outside that patio door, there is a Jacuzzi hot tub, currently about a year old. We do rather enjoy our little luxuries.
To be continued…
