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Rob zombie

Rob zombie

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Went to view a house yesterday. It’s pretty big. Actually it’s massive. My wife refused to even go view it due to the size but she’s now really coming round to the idea and starting to get enthusiastic about it. It’s a bit of an oddball house with 6 bedrooms, 2 kitchens, 4 bathrooms and a football pitch sized living room that could easily take 100 pinball machines around the edges and nobody would even notice.

I suppose what I’m asking is...is this insane? How much would it cost to heat in the winter? I asked all these questions to the owner yesterday but he’s nearly 90 and basically said there are two boilers and they just switch whichever one on depending on which side of the house they’re using. The roof was apparently completely redone a few years ago with EU funding to the tune of £75K. It’s also stormclad with 25yr guarantee. All brickwork repointed and immaculate. It’s a historic building but surprisingly not listed. He said the guy that came out to do the energy efficiency testing didn’t bring a ladder tall enough (it’s a huge building) and so had to list it as ‘no roof insulation found’.

Just not sure if I’m taking on too big a thing. Need a sanity check.
 
got a zoopla for it?

TBH this is what I'm looking for. Not found anything suitable and am getting close to buying land and building my own place.
 
Lol this is exactly why I didn’t add a link :) Probably way too northern for you though Neil :)
 
yeah I'm not moving out of Surrey but just interested in what it looks like
 
Who's going to be doing the cleaning? Unless you have plans for a house that size or it is too good a price to turn down it sounds from what you have said it is too large for your needs and will come with all the headaches of maintaining a large house.
 
Marvello said:
Who's going to be doing the cleaning? Unless you have plans for a house that size or it is too good a price to turn down it sounds from what you have said it is too large for your needs and will come with all the headaches of maintaining a large house.
Click to expand...

Our current 5 bedroom 4 bathroom 4 reception room house is already too much in terms of cleaning. We have the heating on 24/7 for at least 6 months of the year due to the grade 2 listed single pane windows. I’m thinking this one might actually be less expensive to heat with it’s double glazing....but **** it’s big.
 
I love the idea of moving from a terrace to a big place.

I suspect the reality is very different though. Sod the heating bills etc it would be the general upkeep that would kill me. After you get past a certain size there must always be something that needs repairing.

Similarly big houses come with big gardens. Unless you’re in the income league and can afford a full time gardener then who’s going to do all that?

Still like looking and dreaming though....
 
Hey. As some idiot that bought a dream house in a terrible state I can share a few stories about going too big.
Ours isn’t huge but is an Edwardian five bedroom with a potted history.
You pay so much extra money for unneeded space, council tax, insurance, heating, furniture, windows.
If it is in a good state then you might be lucky but if those rooms need renovating then it is very expensive and if the money isn’t flowing it becomes stop start.
We watched the 80’s film Money Pit before putting in an offer but it isn’t so funny some days.

And most tradesman can’t do the older houses justice and you get the issues we have had.
Leaking replacement toilets
The electrician who quoted for a weeks work, he stayed for a month.
£40k for windows for 2/3rds of the house, never properly finished.
£300 in gas in the first 4 weeks of moving in and we didn’t actually feel warm.
The cost of new radiators.
The cost of doing the plaster properly.
The cost of changing all the lightbulbs...

The only person who quoted and turned up to do gardening work was my neighbours grown up nephew. He is a dreamer like me. Some have left when they saw the state of garden.

Then I think about lock down and how much we have achieved this year as we couldn’t go anywhere else and I love this old lump.
 
I feel like all the expensive things have already been done. It just needs updated carpets and fittings. Maybe an Aga and a log burner in the future. The problem is that the amount of carpet it needs is VAST. I have no idea how much that would cost. The offensive 70’s carpet that it immediately needs replacing probably covers most average sized houses x3. But everything else looks fine.
 
Marvello said:
You weren't joking about being able to fit 100 Pins around the edges, strewth!
Click to expand...

Yeah there’s more to that room and then there’s a massive cross shaped section plus an office that could probably take another hundred or more pins on that floor. It’s a crazy amount of space. Normally this is the sort of thing I’d jump into...and I am....but it’s certainly daunting this time.
 
Marvello said:
I'd need Sat Nav in a house that big.
Click to expand...

The owner said he had it as a guesthouse at one point and he would regularly get phone calls from guests asking the way out. I can definitely see that happening, it’s not in any way a normal or easily understandable flow.
 
Marvello said:
Who's going to be doing the cleaning? Unless you have plans for a house that size or it is too good a price to turn down it sounds from what you have said it is too large for your needs and will come with all the headaches of maintaining a large house.
Click to expand...

He’s married dood. [emoji23]


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In my view getting you home right is the most important thing you can do. I moved out of London in 2014 and I wish I had done it sooner.


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Pick Holder said:
Whatever house you have - you will fill it and say you need more room !
Click to expand...

I’m totally there already. I have rooms filled with stuff in boxes ready to fill rooms with Welsh Dressers. I have Victorian flat iron collections. You name it. WW2 trench art etc. Everything really.
 
I did similar back in the 90's moved from a very small terraced to a huge GII listed semi with 4 receptions, 6 beds and 2 baths, attics and cellars. 11ft high ceilings. The old woman we bought it from lived there 45+ years and had 11 dogs, it hadn't been touched in terms of modernization for most of that time - so all original victorian features, 1950's decor. Day 1 we skipped all the amazing quality beautiful thick pile, dog pis smelling carpets. Filled 3 skips. I couldn't afford new carpets really, so I got the local carpet warehouse to do the whole house in their cheapest 'contract' carpet. It was like paper - cheap as - 50p a sq yd. It lasted for nearly 10 years in some of the rooms and was the most hard wearing carpet I've ever bought. Money was tight, but we did the essentials, CH and insulation. The rest came in time and it took 10 years to decorate and refurb every room. The heating bills were awful, but that was because the plumber just rammed in a huge boiler. It was far too big for the house. The guy I sold it to drastically reduced costs by replacing it. The next door neighbour in the same style house had two small boilers, one for the ground floor and one for bedrooms, and that worked out cheaper. The house never got really warm, because of the very high ceilings, but you soon get used to it and wear more clothes.

If you want it, just go for it - you will always find a way to pay the bills, take your time to refurb it. Don't bother with carpets. Or if you really need em, get cheap throw away stuff until you can afford better. Spend all you spare money on pinball machines, they will help greatly (they warm the house too, remember!) . You can never have enough space. Open a pinball museum......
 
Sounds like a few have gone through what I am doing, we keep referring to the 10 year plan but as in "it will be finished in 10 years".

Carpet the rooms you are actually going to use, sounds big enough that you can happily live in some of it whilst the rest is completed.
Please send me the right move or zoopla link, I love this stuff, as I said, I am a dreamer even if my back and body says I am too broken to do any more work.
 
You’ve got to go for it as long as you are not over stretching yourself financially as there will always be work for do when you first purchase it because if an older gent has been there for years on his own, it won’t be properly maintained. 100k can be swallowed up pretty quickly in a house that size. Like you said the bonus is it isn’t listed as that’s a whole new set of problems that can get super expensive.
Having said that these opportunities don’t come around often. Grab it with both hands. Our last house in London was a 5 bed we designed and built ourselves and I genuinely believed we would be there for years. But along came an opportunity I couldn’t pass up to develop some listed barns. It was the best decision we’ve ever made. Lifestyle, pace of life and environment to raise our children is so much better.
(One of the best parts of huge houses is Christmas time is epic. We regularly have 20 family here Xmas day for dinner and almost everyone stays until the 27th without people sleeping on blow up beds etc.)
 
We live in a house we built from scratch on a plot of land in our village. I too thought we would be here forever. But earlier this year we nearly moved and bought a wooden house in the countryside. Bigger plot, more eco friendly. We didn't do it because of concerns over the way the house had been built. But i regret it.
Lesson in life: it is better to regret something you have done, then something you havent done.
Morale: go for it. If it doesn't work out, you will be able to revert to any 'normal' house at a later date.
 
I have lived in a converted Victorian school for about 20 years now, huge rooms, monster garage and a big outbuilding which was the boys and girls toilets.
I have spent quite a bit on hardwood box sash windows and doors as I couldn’t just have that plastic crap on an old building but understand why people do it.
You get used to the size and like has been said you can heat the rooms you use unless you have damp problems I guess.
House feels a lot smaller after living here 20 years though, I rarely go up stairs!
Sounds like a good move to me.
 
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