Self-Sufficiency in Style
Buying your smallholding - Part Two
Don't wear yourselves out!
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Self-Sufficiency in Style Buying your smallholding - Part Two Don't wear yourselves out! |
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The world at your feet. |
You have just inherited a million from
Great Uncle Archibald, sold an expensive and fashionable house in
London, Dublin or Washington and the world is your oyster. You are going to kick over the traces and buy your hearts desire - your self-sufficiency smallholding. Money is no problem and you expect the process of choosing from hundreds of candidates to be pure pleasure. |
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farming papers, plunder the internet and start ringing the estate agents. Within days, your doormat is covered in brochures describing likely looking places and your phone never stops ringing with invitations to view. You accept some. The cat and dog are put into kennels and you take off in the car. |
Inundated with brochures. |
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Smallholding hunting is a pleasure that pales. |
Within days, disillusion sets
in. The mileage on the car escalates, hotel bills rise through the roof, you
spend days in departure lounges and are seasick on a regular basis. Worse, you have to endure dozens of viewings of totally unsuitable smallholdings, being endlessly polite to enthusiastic vendors. You knew as soon as you pulled up outside that the place was not for you. Money is not the issue. Whatever the price, the place was not for you, but you have an appointment and decency makes you keep it. |
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Even with effectively unlimited funds, the location may not appeal. |
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Maybe, you realise you will miss the mountains or the sea. Perhaps, like the writer, you really prefer the flat lands of the east, the rich farms and prosperous churches. More commonly it is a "nasty". Something that you can't or won't tolerate. A pig or poultry farm next door, an electricity pylon in the back yard, a noisy road... a hundred things that you don't feel the need to compromise about and that did not feature in the brochure |
Decorating the site. |
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. A sea of bad coffee and no light on the horizon. |
The writer's experience when
smallholding hunting was horrendous. It took a long time to realise that a little clever planning, coupled with a more disciplined approach, saves time, energy and money and is much more likely to secure the place of dreams. You also drink a lot less bad coffee. |
| You begin to wonder why Estate Agents are
so keen that you should view. That's easy. It keeps their client happy, and if they fail to get a buyer makes it easier for a perhaps over priced property, to be reduced. The fact that it wastes the potential buyer's time is, rightly, not their concern. Anyway, no seller will allow the Estate Agent to list any potential faults on the details...except perhaps this one. One man's "secluded" is another's "isolated." |
Even if you do not buy, the fact that you have viewed may help the estate agent sell. |
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The moral of this story is that your time is valuable and you should use it well. |
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...time, energy and money saving - from an efficient Hangman's Cottage, just to the south of Misery Corner. |
