Thank you RusBun for explaining more about your circumstances. You both sound very brave, determined and practical. I can see how your professional skills would enable you to see the potential in a property that many others might not see. We can only see an aerial view and the floor plan so it may well be that you can fix, fairly easily, some of the things that have deterred others from buying it and make it more saleable in the future. I would still be wary of the position on the bend though.
Sometimes, other things end up compensating for what doesn’t seem ideal at the time.
When late DH and I moved to this house, I was 28, it ticked a box (my only absolute was that it be detached - no neighbour noise through party walls) but I wasn’t in love with the place and it seemed small compared to where we were coming from - a very large semi with 300 feet of garden. In actual fact, the floor space is almost the same, but square rather than rectangular, the garden a third of the size but more than enough.
Choice was very limited by what we could afford. We wanted to move quickly and there were only three houses in our price range. The nicest one had character but was on a main and very busy road so that was discounted immediately. I cannot bear traffic noise - one of the reasons we were moving from a house just up from a bend. The second nicest was on the wrong side of town for me, too far from the railway station involving a traffic-clogged, cross-town bus journey. It would have increased rather than decreased my daily commute, another reason for moving. So we bought the third, in a very quiet lane and close to the station.
Forty years later and widowed going on twenty years, the things that bugged me then about the house and which can’t be changed, still bug me now but it has proved to be a wonderful community to live in. I value it even more now that am forty years older and alone.
I also have an auto immune condition, diagnosed out of the blue at 60 so I know how drastically the chronic fatigue that comes with it can change our lives. A garden blitz, which I love to do, can also leave me exhausted for days. I’m not yet ready to get a man in as I like to garden but that time may be approaching. Stairs are manageable even when I am at my lowest ebb. I’ve realised there are stairs and stairs. Recently, I helped a friend to clear his mother’s house after she had gone into care. The stairs in her 1950s house seemed (and were) so much steeper than mine, I suppose because it’s a much smaller house, the angle needs to be more acute to achieve the same height. How she managed until she was 95 with arthritic joints, no stairlift and no downstairs loo remains a mystery. I mention it as there might just be a house out there for you where stairs are comparatively shallow and manageable, lift or no.
You said, would this property suit US (your emphasis)? You don’t need anyone to tell you that you have to be pragmatic about all the best and worst possible scenarios that life could throw at you both even in the next ten years. I know only too well, but the imperfect house could turn out to be the nicest community.
Do some sleuthing about the apparent lack of sales appeal for others and keep us posted. I wish you luck.
