A little bit different

We live in the house that belonged to a stationmaster so as you would guess we are close to a railway station! I am jealous of Riverview
I wish we had had sufficient funds for a place in London, SE1/Waterloo would have been my ideal spot, and a place near family! Greedy me!

You still have to go through a solicitor, Soontobe, and presumably gagagran and others who sell their property themselves would get a professional valuation first.

Gagagran
Do you ever run into legal problems?
That is what would stop me selling something as expensive as a house online I think.

Don't worry Gillybob. My house is post war,designed by a single minded obsessive and built by Jerry and his firm of bodgers. It's taken me nearly 40 years to get it anything reasonable and lots of things now are needing replacing like doors and windows. But we are minutes from the station, the bus station and the centre of town and are surrounded by green and trees and birdsong. Six and two threes.

No absolutely not grannyactivist. My remark was not aimed at anyone at all.

We have sold all the 6 houses we have owned without using an estate agent. The last two properties we sold to the daughter of friends but prior to that we sold by putting adverts in the local paper and putting up homemade "For Sale" signs in the front gardens. We have had no problems to speak of and I accept that we may have been lucky in that, but problems can arise when using agents and seem to do quite often.

I can't see that estate agents do much to earn their fees and we must have saved thousands of pounds over the years in their fees. It's not hard to show a house to potential buyers and you know its pluses and minuses better than any estate agent. There is plenty of advice and information online regarding price levels (Rightmove, Zoopla, Mouseprice etc) and on TV how to present/dress the place

I would always try to sell a property myself and maybe try online selling if it stalled.

Ours is a 1930s house with many original features including Crittall windows with leaded lights. We also have an air raid shelter in the back garden. It is a surface shelter with walls 3ft thick and a grass roof. When the children in our road are 'doing' ww2 as a project ,they come to visit and have their photos taken wearing a tin hat and spraying the garden with a stirrup pump while standing in front of the air raid shelter. What a photo for the project book!

Oops - I'm guessing gillybob's remark was aimed at me. Sorry, wasn't meant as a boast.

MariClaire your home and surroundings sound wonderful - I love California.

Are you near Monterey, Salinas etc? I'm a big fan of Steinbeck and have been to that area a number of times. Have a good friend in Paso Robles.

And just to add to that kitty, home is home isn't it? And your last sentence is what's most important, it's where our families (especially DGC) like to come.

Sorry if I came across as a GOW last night.

Not at all kitty! My post was tongue in cheek. It may not have come across that way, sorry. (And that's to all of you).
It is just rather amusing to read through this thread in its entirety! It can lead to serious house envy

nightowl and gillybob, sorry, if my posts about our house have come across as boasting!

DH & I love our house for it's fabulous features not because of its size or it's value (neither huge) We also love it despite the cost of trying to keep warm, stop it leaking and the fact that , because it is open plan, it is not child friendly!

Mostly though, we love it because it is our home and a place a DC & DGC like to come!

I would love to see your homes and settings because I love houses too, and yours all sound unique and charming to this American! Well, our home is a rambling "California Ranch" house, a long/angled one-story custom built in 1953 that we bought in 2000. Its modern style "brings the outdoors in". The setting lies among rural homes, rolling terrain, vineyards and mountain views. I feel closer to the past when I hear the bells ringing from the old Adobe 1778 California Mission a bit behind us. Our home has its original swimming pool, jacuzzi, and poolhouse with cedar lined dressing rooms and a bath. Our full remodel left us with 12 exterior French doors, 6 skylights, and each main room has windows on three sides. All this light and undraped glass reveals a 250 year old giant oak tree, 200+ oak, plane, maple, pine and california pepper trees, and 100+ roses in various gardens. And my DDH takes care of it all!! Oh, and our kitchen and sitting room also had a built-in tri-tip barbecue which I thought very strange but discovered was all the rage in 1950. I transformed it into a fireplace. I could live here forever. . Sorry..post too long!!

Bet my dad's even bigger gillybob

My house, on the other hand, is crap.

rubylady finding the houses is the easy part, I think. It's getting the sale to run smoothly that is the problem. All of my sisters lost their partners at the same time, but for different reasons. As I had so much experience of moving, it sort of all fell to me as one by one they all wanted or needed to move. So stressful, and we did lose several houses along the way and had to find others just as nice. It's bad enough hearing your sisters being picky about near-perfect houses, it would drive me mad to hear someone else doing it. My Mil asked my advice on how to sell her house quickly. I told her, and she ignored me!!! It took a stroppy estate agent, fed up with taking the blame, to get her to smarten up her entrance and get rid of all the clutter. It has taken her more than four years so far...

Well my dads bigger than your dad !

I must admit I enjoyed helping my daughter when she was househunting earlier this year. One of her main requirements was that it must be a 'Christmas' house; somewhere with rooms big enough to dress for Christmas with lots of room for guests and space for a spectacular tree. The house she eventually bought is named after the doctor who lived there and meets her requirements for Christmas perfectly.

Mine is nothing special architecturally but it is my new house, having moved in four weeks ago, has wallpaper hanging off the wall, no carpet on the stairs, boxes still all over but I love it to bits, especially at the moment as I have double aspect windows in living room and am getting a spectacular fireworks display while sat very comfortably on my settee. Wonderful.

janerowena Who is this Kirstie Allsop? She's an amateur compared to you. You seem to have a very special skill in finding your sisters houses and they sound wonderful. A lot of people are now putting their houses for sale on the web instead of through estate agents so maybe you could put your talent to use and do house finding as a business?

Another one who could write 'Confessions of a Right-Move Addict'.

It started of course when DBH kept moving us every 18 months because he didn't like his jobs, I was in charge of house-hunting. I always went for houses that I would be able to do up and make a bit of a profit on, because all the constant moving cost us a fortune, literally.

I chose this one because when I got arthritis, I could no longer do up a house in 6 months. It is only 1960s but built in the style of an old Suffolk cottage, and has a big garden that was once a nursery. Apart from opening out all access into the eaves and replacing them with built-in cupboards, building in a new fireplace (mainly builders) and woodburner, putting in real wood flooring and converting the outside buildings to make them liveable, I have done nothing other than remodel the garden.

However, my three sisters have moved several times during the seven year we have lived here, and I have found all their houses for them. One is in an old manor house with a trout stream, which had to be almost totally gutted, one in an old farmworker's cottage just outside Portsmouth and the other has just moved to Avebury, with wonderful unimpeded views across the stones. I found her last house too, it was a beautiful old cottage in a Suffolk village with the additional benefit of an income of £10,000 per annum from a small business being run from a couple of separated-off rooms. I had to find something to replace that income, so found her one with the most amazing bedroom with an ensuite Jacuzzi room that she can rent out as B&B. Visitors/paying guests can sit in the Jacuzzi with a glass of complimentary champagne or fruit juice and look out over the stones. I fear we will never be able to visit as she will be so busy.

Our house is first shown on a record of 1730 though we suspect it is much older than that. When we were doing some building work we found a very ancient pair of shoes (put there for good luck apparently), but sadly they disintegrated in the fresh air. When we moved here we joined two houses together, the smaller house had been lived in by refugees in 1940. In one room downstairs we have a wood-fired bread oven.
We have another little house for guests in the garden, a huge barn, a cellar that runs under the whole of the main house, a chicken house, a wood-store and a potting shed.
We are surrounded by fields, views across hills and lots of cows. The silence is extraordinary and there is no light pollution, so we have a magnificent view of the stars.
We have barn owls who moved out of the roof when we moved into the house. Their descendants still pop back and shriek on the window ledges.

I also fantasise on Right Move ..... all those lovely rectories, old school houses like Kitty's, farmhouses, mini-Georgian piles

Recently my son sent me details of a lovely period house in his Somerset village - it was all wood burner, flagstone floors, Aga, etc and I was tempted to sell up and move from my almost big-enough to swing a cat place and retire to a rural idyll .... then I came to my senses

We have an old WW2 air raid shelter in the garden, which had a tramp living in it when we first moved in. It is now home to several large spiders. it is lined with rusty corrugated iron and still has the stove chimney and the original door with a large, rusty key, although it does not close. The GKs love it for about a minute, then they run out screaming.

We moved to where we are now up north from London after the first house offer we made fell through when the seller could not get his dream home. Hubby had been up here since January and we just needed to get a house before the new school term.

Somewhere with character would be lovely but I will opt for the easy option.

We went for a new build to be finished, as at least it was not then in a chain. It's a good size but I would never now consider going in for a house that needed lot of work.

I am still in the last stages of a kitchen revamp and that is stressful enough. OH is not really into DIY etc. He "pulls his face" when asked to do any.

We live in a farmworker's dwelling. It was built in the 1920s and is a wooden framed, cottage style bungalow. We are a long way from any main roads but next to a busy railway line. The trains don't bother us at all as they are gone in a flash and a high conifer hedge gives the garden plenty of privacy. We have a one acre field where we walk our dogs and we can turn it into a campsite/football pitch for family gatherings.

We bought the property in 1990 and after renovating it let it out for a few years before moving there ourselves in 1998. There was an enormous amount of work to be done on the land which had become an overgrown wilderness and it's been an ongoing labour of love ever since.

Like Kitty I enjoy the RightMove website. If DH is watching football on the telly I'll often set myself a budget, pick an area and have a good nose around the properties for sale.