How we got here

This is a bit of a monster blog to get us up to date, but stick with it ......

In June we saw one barn north of Coventry slip from our grasp as the owner pulled it from sale, then in July we were gazumped on a derelict cottage in Baddesley Clinton.  So when on Thursday 24 Sept I stumbled across this one coming up for auction 5 days later, I immediately took Marley (Michael & Nicola's little dog that we were looking after that day) for a walk in the country.  We both loved it, and had to work out how to convince Misan that this was the one.

We went off to Leeds on the Friday to return Marley, carried on to Manchester to meet up with our ex-ex-pat pat friends for our annual Nigerian Reunion weekend - and Misan still hadn't seen the barn.  When we got home on the Sunday evening we went to the barn and had a look around for about 15 mins in the evening twilight.  Decisions made - we were going to the auction on Tuesday.

I collected the legal pack on the Monday morning, passed it to our solicitor on the Monday evening and went through it with him for an hour on the Tuesday afternoon just before going down to the auction.

The guide price was £80-90,000.  The price shot up quickly before we joined in to stop the gavel dropping on £125k, then it kept going between 3 or 4 bidders until we won it just inside our limit!

That left us with no funds to bid for the paddock, which had a guide of £10-20k, but we did bid up to £47k before we pulled out, and it went for £64k!  A pretty expensive 2/3rd's of an acre of grazing land.

That was bad news.  The land that comes with the barn isn't that big.  But we immediately had good news as the paddock auction was won by a consortium of neighbours, and they came across to meet us after the auction and have agreed to sell us a bit of the paddock.  OK, it will be expensive for what it is, but it will add to the value of the barn and will give us the land we need for ground source heating and a big garden/orchard.

So we signed the contract and paid our 10% deposit.  Next day we cobbled together our savings to cover that.  Since then, it's been hectic, appointing the solicitor, arranging funding, meeting the planner, finding an architect, talking to a structural engineer (the more we investigate, the more we find out how much needs doing to stabilise the walls), getting quotes to remove the asbestos animal pen, visiting Grand Designs Live at the NEC, negotiating the extra land, trying to understand the VAT rules, taking photos and starting a video diary, doing a more detailed budget, meeting the neighbours, measuring the barn, collecting a trailer from Gill my sister, getting new wheels and tyres for the trailer after one tyre almost came off on the way home - all this in the last 2 weeks whilst I'm really busy at work and Misan chose to contract flu.

Completion of the purchase is set for 3 Nov ...