The dream house that nearly bankrupted us
Woodworm. Rats. And don’t mention the sewage! We’ve all fallen in love with a holiday home, but when HARRY WALLOP bought one in the Lakes, he soon found himself in deep water...
MY WIFE has had a lifelong obsession with Hercule Poirot. Specifically the television series starring David Suchet as the Belgian detective.
As a teenager, she would watch on Sunday nights with her father, the two of them trying to work out who was the dastardly poisoner before Poirot’s little grey cells got there first.
After my wife’s father died, four years ago, Vic spent many afternoons curled up on the sofa watching endless re-runs of Poirot on ITV3, persuading our children to join in the game of guessing the murderer.
So perhaps it was inevitable that, when we saw Endymion House, in the foothills of Skiddaw, in the Lake District, she would set her heart on it.
It was completely incongruous: an Art Deco house in the middle of the Lakes.
All the other properties in this part of north Cumbria are made of slate or granite; heavy-set farmhouses built to survive the foul weather that is as much a part of this corner of Britain as Beatrix Potter or Cumberland sausage.
This, however, was different: all sleek lines and huge windows, an ocean liner perched on a hillside, just waiting for Poirot and Captain Hastings to turn up. Or my wife.
for the past year, Vic had been plotting to buy a holiday home in the Lake District. This place, she told me, came with four acres, a stable ‘we could turn into a games room for the kids’, and a large garden just ready for me to ‘build a treehouse’.
Considering I can barely put together flatpack furniture without being told I need to attend an anger management course, this seemed fanciful. But I had other, more pressing concerns.
How much did it cost? I asked nervously. Vic was sure we could get it for less than the asking price. No, seriously. How much?
Endymion House was on the market for a cool £1 million. Yes, £1 million!
Well, that was that. There was no way we could possibly buy this. End of story.
Vic looked crestfallen. She thought she had finally found her dream property.
BORN
and brought up in the Lakes, she would return frequently, with me and our four children, for birthdays, Christmases, weddings and funerals.
But when her father died, her 85-year-old mother had decided to move away from the area to be closer to two of Vic’s sisters.
It’s only when you try to pull out some roots, however, that you see how deep they run. The lure of the fells was too strong.
In recent years, we’d kept schlepping up from our home in London for half-terms, renting a place and saying: wouldn’t it be amazing to have our own house here? Could we afford it?
Well, with some money put aside, maybe we could buy a small cottage. I loved the idea. But a small cottage had a snag: it would not be big enough to host any of Vic’s large family. Because with my wife always comes her family. They come as a job lot.
There’s not only her mother, but also three sisters, their husbands and eight nephews and nieces. All told, there are 20 of them. Or ‘us’, as I am often reminded.
Remarkably, we all get on. Or at least well enough to go on holiday together every summer.
But there was never going to be a big enough house in the Lake District that we could afford. It may be England’s most northwesterly county, but, two years ago, its astounding beauty meant that it was designated a Unesco World Heritage Site, further pushing up property prices.
Vic refused to be deterred, however, and insisted that if we rented out the house for most of the year, we could make it work.
Well, yes, in theory we could. If we spent every last penny that had been put aside for retirement and funding four children through university. It was a plan that filled me with trepidation.
But Vic eventually persuaded me that, if we made a success of it, we’d not only get our savings back, but ultimately make a modest income from the place. But first we needed to borrow. I asked our bank about remortgaging our house in London in order to fund a purchase. They almost laughed when they saw my income from journalism and television work. It was a flat ‘no’.
Then we discovered holiday-let mortgages. Only a small handful of building societies offer them, but they seemed a solution. You borrow money based not on your salary, but on projected income from the holiday home.
Vic was thrilled. I was less so. Was this really a magic money tree, or a slippery financial hole out of which we could never climb? The interest rates on holiday- let mortgages are — unlike normal ones — variable. As in, the rate can increase at any moment depending on the economy.
Would this venture rise or fall on the success of Brexit, who was in Downing Street, or what Donald Trump tweeted? It wasn’t a reassuring prospect.
And how much could we make from renting out a house? On another journey up north to do research, we met a rental agency, Lakelovers, to crunch numbers.
Our agent, Joe Nichols, pointed out that wealthy people do look for nice venues for 40th birthdays, upmarket hen parties, silver wedding anniversaries and New Year’s Eves in the Lakes.
Some high- spec, six-bedroom properties cost more than £8,000 a week to rent out. Admittedly, though, they have private cinema rooms and their own saunas.
Still, he told us that in high season we could rent out this property for £4,000 a week, no problem. We’d have to do it up, though; put in more bathrooms and all the mod cons. A dreaded ‘hot tub’ was mentioned.
‘I hate hot tubs,’ I hissed to Vic. And not only because a nonhideous one costs about £10,000.
The more we discussed it, however, the more I was falling in love with the house and its spectacular views. If I loved it, maybe other people would too and would be willing to pay to stay.
Joe was happy to write a letter to the building society, outlining our projected income. And that was that. Once we’d knocked down the asking price, the building society lent us what seemed to me an astronomical sum of money — indeed, the great majority of the asking price. We had Endymion House. But there was a monumentalsized catch. In order to pay back the mortgage, we’d have to market the house — when we weren’t using it ourselves — as a luxury holiday home.
In other words, we would have to spend enough cash to fill Derwentwater restoring the
property to its former glory: rewire it completely, put in extra bathrooms, a new kitchen, woodburning stoves. The full works.
We would then have to fill it with guests for about 40 weeks of the year. Sure, at New Year and the summer people flock to the Lakes. But a soggy week in February? I wasn’t convinced.
Joe at Lakelovers insisted most properties were full for at least 80 per cent of the time.
To my relief, our budget didn’t stretch to a hot tub. Which was lucky, as a fellow holiday-let owner told us the filters malfunction the moment any hen party with hair extensions jumps in. That saving, however, was not enough to stop our budget spiralling.
In week one, we discovered asbestos lagging the pipes. Soon after, we were told that every one of the Crittall windows (those Thirties metal-framed ones that give the Art Deco architecture its distinctive look) needed replacing.
That was just the beginning. Everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong.
Rats were discovered under the floorboards, a wasp nest in the attic, a leak in the roof. The timber joists holding up the first floor were riddled with woodworm.
The kitchen company went into administration as they were installing it. A carpenter went AWOL for weeks (playing golf in the Algarve, apparently), and each builder’s bill was more expensive than the last.
Then came the septic tank. It was while standing in a waterlogged field at the bottom of the garden, contemplating effluent, that I thought Vic and I would get a divorce.
My wife had decided the most cost- effective option was to give up her part- time job in London to project manage the building works, travelling up to the Lakes for two days a week, taking the cheapest train at 5.30am, while I was left holding the fort in London, doing the school run and paying two mortgages.
Every day I’d look at our bank balance with a sinking heart. It was depressing to be working the hardest I’d ever done only to remain resolutely in the red.
Occasionally, she’d summon me to Cumbria when things got really bad. And the septic tank was one of those moments.
We needed to replace the cracked and overflowing Thirties structure buried beneath the garden; this part of the Lake District has never been on mains drains. But every option seemed either prohibitively expensive, hideously ugly or involved breaking environmental legislation. Or all three. I didn’t quite know what Vic expected me to do, I reflected helpfully. She just wanted me to sort it out, she replied through gritted teeth. Without spending another £10,000. As I reminded her then, I had been promised this project would result in fine views and cocktails, ‘ not a field full of sewage’. That was apparently a low blow.
In the end, with all other avenues exhausted and the banks refusing to lend us any more money, we went begging to friends and family. Which is not something I thought I’d ever have to do at the age of 45 and was moderately humiliating.
At one moment, as I was desperately on the phone to Vic in the Lakes while cooking the children’s tea in London, my 12-year-old daughter asked: ‘Are you going to get a divorce?’ ‘Why?’ I asked cagily. ‘Because at my school,’ she said matter- of- factly, ‘ lots of the parents are divorced. And they are always rowing about money.’
I assured her that we would not be divorcing. But it was a sobering reminder that the children had been unwillingly dragged into this project; we’d already had to cancel a holiday and warned them that their Christmas presents might not be as generous as usual.
We promised them it would be worthwhile in the long term.
‘It’s OK,’ said the 13-year- old. ‘As long as we are together at Christmas in the Lake District, that’s all that matters.’
His comforting words almost broke my heart. Though his younger brother didn’t look convinced by this outbreak of Cratchit family harmony.
Not all of it was a nightmare. Trying to furnish the house in a vaguely Art Deco style, without being slaves to Agatha Christie, was fun. This was the one area that didn’t blow the budget, though it was hardly cheap.
We discovered that if you want to get five stars from Visit England, the official tourist board that rates self-catering properties, each bedroom needs a pair of bedside tables, a chest of drawers, a wardrobe and a dressing table — that’s an enormous amount of furniture to buy, with an equally large price tag.
OUR
salvation came in the form of a couple of auction houses, one of which was based just down the road in Cockermouth. Art Deco furniture is surprisingly unfashionable, meaning we picked up a couple of beautiful burr walnut wardrobes for £ 50 each — considerably cheaper (and far better made) than anything from Ikea.
Also, most regional auction houses now livestream their sales online, so you can bid from the comfort of your sofa or while on a train — though I did accidentally buy a box of broken dolls, rather than a chest of drawers, after the 4G signal dropped on the West Coast Main Line. The auction house was very forgiving when I explained the mistake.
We were also lucky that slightly exuberant Art Deco-style interiors — scallop-backed sofas, goldplated drinks trolleys and the like — were enjoying a moment on the High Street. Homesense (the good-value furniture arm of TK Maxx), H&M Home and even Dunelm became useful places to pick up the odd item.
We’d hoped to have the project finished during late summer last year, maybe autumn. Inevitably it went not only over budget, but over deadline. The months ticked by as our bank balance sank further. And, though the end was in sight, the novelty of the project had completely drained away. unlike the septic tank.
By Christmas, however, the carpets were laid, the curtains were up and the Spode crockery bought at auction was on the plate rack.
Yes, it had almost broken us and, yes, we owed a lot of people a lot of money. But we’d done it.
And, despite the strife, or possibly because of it, we have ended up far closer as a couple, I think. We started out buying a holiday home, but ended up running a business together, with a website, tax returns and all the administration that goes with it.
And, boy, have we learnt a lot. But our very first set of guests have stayed; they even left a glowing review. We may end up making a success of it. For now, I will sip a creme de
menthe while admiring the views out of the new Crittall windows and pretend I am a Belgian detective — or at least Captain Hastings — pondering on the greatest mystery of them all: how we survived not getting divorced.