I always hated the old house.  What can I say? I bought it in a hurry, because we needed to move from Glasgow to Cheesetown before the (then) Cherub moved to high school. And most of my money was still stuck in Glasgow.

People tried to be nice.  Believe me, a lot of faint praise has been lavished on this place.....

  • You get a nice view from here.  Yes things are better if you look out.
  • Garden's easy to maintain Yes for it is tiny
  • Nice you've got an en-suite.  Yes because the shower in the bathroom doesn't work.  At all. Ever
  • So quaint.  Yes because nothing has been done maintenance wise since the last century.

And this house defeated me. The windows and back doors leaked in heavy rain.  And it rains a lot in Scotland.  Half of the upstairs windows were jammed closed.  Conveniently the other half never closed properly, but rattled in the gentlest of breezes.  The double glazing was shot. Even in high summer the place was freezing.  In winter we hugged the radiators (literally) or the dog or both.

And I'd had enough.. There's only so long you can happily remind yourself "At least it's cheap"

The problem was - how could I honestly sell this house in good faith to someone else? How could I fail to mention the strange smell from underneath the garage, and the recent spate of car burnings in the village?  How could I look any buyer in the eye and not mention that the house is on the way from the pub to the housing estate and you get woken up regularly in the wee small hours? I might be a drama queen, but I'm not a good enough actress to smile and mutter about being so sorry to leave this..

And so it was that I found a property developer who would accept my house in part exchange for a new house being built in a new development.  And they only had a huge five bed roomed place left. And I only had.. my house.  And so the deal was done.

And we both thought we'd got the best of the deal....

Which as any fule kno can't be the case...