House Fancy

"People stop and stare. They don't bother me.
For there's no where else on earth that I would rather be.
Let the time go by, I won't care if I
Can be here on the street where you live."

- "On The Street Where You Live",
music and lyrics by Frederick Loewe and Alan Jay.


Aside from my stunning progress in struggling to keep up with my new year's resolution of blogging every day, it seemed today that another promise to myself was in danger of being broken.

For some time, and for no particular reason, I have found a most pleasant way to while away my spare hours, by sitting down with my iPad (yes, thankyou, I rock) and idly browsing through details of properties for sale in my local area. It really is quite entrancing.

I'm not quite sure what the attraction is, although it certainly seems an innocent enough way to pass the time, looking at nice photographs of other people's houses. Especially the big one with the staircase and the open-air kitchen and indoor swimming pool. That might be nice.

I do also notice how many homes which are up for sale seem to have very old-style television sets in them. I wonder if there's a reason for that.

Anyway, although I don't really have the money to buy a house, I probably could buy something on the cheap side if I really really had to. From quite a young age I knew that mortgages were not for me, and I told myself that I would buy my first house with cash money. It would be mine from day one.

It's certainly nice to have a dream - even if an unattainable one. I suspect that my grand notions of cash purchase may have actually been more of a kind of 'psychological insurance', insulating myself from the harsher realities that (1) if I had a mortgage, I would have to work for a living even on occasions when I did not necessarily want to or even feel like it, and by (2) making the prospect desirable but unachievable, therefore placing it just far enough out of reach not to be dangerous.

And that said, while I have nosed around to see what mortgages are all about (I have decided that I like offset mortgages very much, and ones which incorporate ISAs even more so, although these are harder to find) this is to satisfy my curiosity only. If I were to buy a house at the moment, it seems that even with my preferred mortgage I would need a deposit of at least 25%. This doesn't seem unreasonable but does place all but the smallest and noisiest properties entirely out of bounds.

And that may be no bad thing. No harm in inertia, after all.

But all of that said.... for the right property, maybe I would make an exception. One of my more fanciful notions that I have is that, if they should ever become available, I would buy one or both of the houses that I grew up in. Now this revelation will probably have all the psychologists in the public gallery jumping up and running towards the payphones in the lobby because it probably says a lot about me - doubtless some latent desire to revert to childhood or something - or, then again, perhaps it doesn't. Who knows? But I do kind of take the view that the houses I lived in as a child were actually mine, and that buying them back after all these years is nothing more than reclaiming what was taken from me.

Guess what popped up on my computer screen at the weekend?

It's pretty rare to see any houses for sale in the street where I lived, so seeing the street name listed came as a bit of a surprise. I took a look and saw a house. A good start. That street does have a few blocks of flats at the bottom of the road, but, no, this was a house. It didn't say which number it was, but that didn't matter, because the asking price was a pretty chunky £450,000.

That's a lot of money for an old house. But there are photos too. It seems that the current owner has engaged in a 'money-no-object' restoration. Certainly it does look very nice from the supplied pictures.

I wonder if this was my house?

Not having seen it for over 30 years, my memories were slightly hazy, but I suppose that could be the cupboard under the stairs, and that bedroom on the floorplan could be the old upstairs kitchen. More pictures. Is this my bedroom? Is this the back garden where I planted my tomato tree and fed the fish?

It doesn't say. You'd think there'd at least be some kind of blue plaque on the wall indicating my previous presence at this location. Not so. How on earth can I find out which house this is?

I suppose that if all else fails, I could actually leave the house and go for a walk up the road in question. It's not actually that far away from where I live now. But happily, modern technology makes such travel unncessary. Step forward Google Street View. Unfortunately even this is not as helpful as I'd hoped, since it seems to think that every house in the road is number thirty-one. I'm thinking that's unlikely. And for whatever reason, many of the houses in the road seem strangely coy about displaying their house numbers in a manner prominent enough to come out on my fuzzy computer screen.

But eventually, after much attention to detail, and cross-referencing several other photographs, it becomes clear. It's not my house up for sale. It's next door. You can tell because the tree with the yellow and red leaves is on the right hand side of the photo, so that means this must be next door.

I find myself somewhat relieved. Although there is indeed absolutely no possibility of me dropping a cool half-mill on a house, it would have been quite a terrible thing for the purchase opportunity to have arisen before I had the necessary funds available.

A little further research shows that the house-next-door was sold at the end of 2008 for about £240,000, so the "current owner" with their "money-no-object" restoration would seem to be engaged in what I am informed is called "flipping". Good luck to them. I'm sure I'll make the new buyers' acquaintance one day.