Dream Properties or Nightmares?

"Engine House by the Sea" by europa.foto

I promised myself that whilst looking for places to buy in Cornwall I'd look at places that were beyond as well as within our budget. Especially since the property market may well be about to dip sufficiently that places like this become affordable. Some of them also have things like holiday cottages to let out thus, partly, financing themselves (maybe).

All the suppositions here are mine - they are the things I'd be checking out given my reading of the agent's descriptions.

What does one expect when paying over 3/4 of a million pounds? Well one thing I really would expect would be a loo close to at least one of the bedrooms... this however is not available at Fox Park, Bodmin on at £795,000 - but it does have two holiday cottages (1 bed and 2 bed) and its own website through which these can be booked - looking at this website one is immediately struck by the services which the holiday maker is being sold - in particular:

Experience the luxury of a chaffeur driven bentley to your chosen restaurant or have a tour of the cornish coutryside. All for free!

So the buyer of this place had better have a Bentley and someone to drive it, preferably in uniform, for those holiday makers who have already booked whilst this promise is in place.... and yes it looks like quite a few bookings have been accepted for 2008 making it an interesting going concern... just one I don't think our Vauxhall Meriva can live up to! (The new owner might like to correct the spelling mistakes on the website too :-)

• Pluses - two holiday cottages each with hot tubs, a recently restored 4 bedroom main house, nearly 12 acres of land
  
• Minuses - main house's bathroom on the ground floor, bedrooms on the 2nd floor; rather closer to the A30 than I'd like (good for access maybe bad for noise)
• Interesting - those hot tubs cost £10k each and they really want you to know that!

Its worrying that the estate agent describes the main residence as having:

well planned accommodation on three levels and full details of this can be seen on the attached plans.

Since when is having the only bathroom to a four bedroomed house two floors below those bedrooms well-planned? The fact that the agent did not describe the accommodation in more
detail in writing is surely a clue to this big problem in the layout. If I was visiting this property I'd be looking at whether there was any chance of giving up one of the bedrooms and putting in an upstairs bathroom.

Another property: this one is Ralph's Cottage Trenowth Truro currently on at £750,000. It is described as:

An idyllic Grade II Listed Country Cottage set in a rural hamlet and presented to a high standard. The property has a detached barn with 12 month holiday usage, a detached triple garage block, separate detached garage and a further barn. It sits in established mature gardens with lawns, shrub and flowering borders and an orchard and vegetable patch. In all the plot extends to about 2 acres with far reaching countryside views.

However the map shows it as being practically on a railway line - so that idyll will be broken whenever a train goes by... Maps are usually driven by postcode so this may be wrong - lets hope so! The holiday cottage doesn't appear to have a bedroom so is presumably a studio which means sleeping in the same room as the (noisy) 'fridge... therefore not somewhere I'd choose to stay... it also only has a shower, no bath...I bet it doesn't even have a dishwasher, one isn't mentioned - I won't stay anywhere without one, since a self-catering holiday is hardly a holiday if it means doing loads of washing up - and from the point of view of buying it this holiday cottage looks too small to do much with to improve it.

• Pluses - one holiday cottage, garden plus paddock of somewhere between 1.5 and 2 acres, the main house
  
• Minuses - near to a railway line, holiday cottage without even 1 separate bedroom
  
• Interesting - it says there are "splendid rural views" but no examples are shown

Daisy's Barn and Toffee Barn,Trevigro, Callington, Cornwall currently on at £650,000. Here the problem seems likely to be the property that isn't included in the sale - "A further adjoining two cottages with full residential planning permission in 1.6 acres are also available by separate negotiation". They get access over a bridge that belongs to this property. Clearly these are being split off to increase the chances of sale but given that they are all together at the moment they probably function better that way... (I don't know the properties this is just my "reading between the lines").

• Pluses - a 2 bed holiday cottage, 4.4 acres, the main house is a barn conversion with lots of accommodation on the ground level
  
• Minuses - split-level in living room, restricted headroom in upstairs rooms. Holiday cottage has a bedroom without a loo on the same level. Those other nearby properties.
  
• Interesting - River Lynher frontage - this might be good or bad - depends on flooding...