House Viewing: Mould Mansion

As promised, here is a post house-viewing post. I thought I'd start putting pictures into posts, so you get a glimpse into the diversity of properties we're looking at, and also to break up my long-winded rambling and many-comma'd sentences:-) All photos are courtesy of Lotte on this occasion..

And so, I shall call this property Mould Mansion, for the straightforward reason that I have never seen such levels of mould and damp in my life. It was extraordinary! The interesting thing was that this property - a three floor Victorian terrace split into 3 flats - was really a trip through the extremes of the property market. The top floor flat was really rather well-appointed, with nice floors/wallpaper/giant picture frames with armchairs in (ok, that last bit was unusual). You'd never know what lay below. There are 4 rentable private spaces up there, a bathroom and a door to the fire escape/garden. Lovely sea views too. One of the rentable spaces is 2 ajoining rooms, which could well come in handy for some of us.

The next floor down is about the same standard as a lot of rented accomodation round here. A bit mouldy, in need of decoration, with some strange choices of carpet - all par for the course, really. This floor has a bathroom and 3 rentable spaces. Again, 2 of them are ajoining spaces, which means the space sizes end up being pretty ok all round. The joyous thing about this house is that we fit, which makes us very, very excited.

Excited... but daunted. Because on the ground floor is the most fascinating mould-based civilisation, spanning the kitchen, bathroom and part of the dining room. Oh my word, it is immense. Truly, fascinatingly immense. I shan't show you photos, you'd re-visit your dinner.On the plus side there are some great-sized communal rooms, and everywhere you look you can see the potential for this to be a fantastic home.

Much to my delight there are decent gardens to the front and back. Mattie is rather beautifully modelling the back garden in the photo to the left:-)

Even more pleasingly, we'd be making sure this rather posh, yet neglected, house would be available at affordable rent for years to come. To further highlight the wondrousness of this possibility, another woman was viewing the house at the same time as us. Mattie and I asked her what she was looking for, and she said "A bargain that I can make some money on". I felt a sneaky sense of pride that we would be creating a longer lasting, and more community-minded, legacy if we were the ones to buy the house.

We've a meeting tonight where I suspect we'll decide to do a second viewing, hopefully with a builder friend in tow. The house is up for auction (a whole other level of complexity when applied to co-op finances) so there's no knowing the price, but I think we will be following this one very closely whatever we decide to do as a group. I just hope that whoever buys it gives it the TLC that it deserves.

Hannah