Chapter 16
16
‘What about this one?’ Rebecca asks, passing the tablet that she’s welded to these days across to me. Oily Pete came good and my current account is now a worrying sum in credit. I look at the property on screen. It’s a three-bedroom end-of-terrace in Ashford that’s definitely in need of some TLC. The auction guide price is ￡230,000.
‘I’m thinking lose a bedroom, move the bathroom upstairs and extend the kitchen. The rest probably just needs a lick of paint and a tidy up. The garden’s a mess, but that shouldn’t be too difficult to sort out.’
I zoom in on some of the pictures, and something catches my eye.
‘The wallpaper’s peeling away here, can you see?’ I say, handing the tablet back.
‘Oh, well spotted. You’re thinking damp?’
‘It’s definitely a risk. What are the modernised houses in that area going for?’
‘Two sixty to two ninety.’
‘Mm, not a lot of margin even if we get it for the guide price.’
‘Yeah, but I think we have to set our sights a little low, at least to start. We both know that we could have made much more in London, but we’d need to spend much more up front and we wouldn’t have the luxury of living here pretty much rent free. However, I agree. This one is too tight, especially if there’s damp. I’ll keep looking.’
‘How is the cut-throat world of property development this morning?’ Mum asks as she brings in three mugs of tea and settles herself on the sofa next to Rebecca.
‘I’m just looking at the properties coming up next month, Cath,’ Rebecca tells her.
‘Can I see?’ Rebecca hands her the tablet and Mum starts scrolling slowly.
‘They’re all a bit run-down, aren’t they?’ she observes.
‘That’s the point, Mum,’ I explain for what feels like the thousandth time. ‘If they’re not run-down we can’t add value to them and make a profit.’
‘I don’t know. Saffy reckons her house is probably worth a lot more than they bought it for.’
‘Yes, but they’ve been in it for years. The aim for us is to get in and get out fast.’
‘So you say. It all seems very risky to me, but I’m sure you know what you’re doing. Oh, this is nice.’
She hands the tablet to Rebecca, who takes her time looking at it. ‘It is pretty, I agree,’ she remarks after a while. ‘I love the pond.’
‘You could have ducks on it,’ Mum observes.
‘Blimey, it’s got ten acres of land. That’s practically a whole county! I wonder why it’s so cheap?’
‘What are you looking at?’ I ask.
‘This,’ Rebecca tells me, handing over the tablet. The property in question is a pretty two-bedroom stone cottage with a large pond next to it and, as Rebecca pointed out, an awful lot of land. The guide price is ￡800,000. That’s not what catches my eye though. Attached to the cottage is a second building, on the side of which is a massive, tatty-looking tarpaulin that, although it’s hard to see because it’s partly obscured by a fallen tree, appears to be covering something large and round.
‘Is that a watermill?’ I ask as I hand the tablet back. ‘What on earth would you do with something like that?’
We’re interrupted by the arrival of Saffy and a very excited Louis. Since we moved here, Louis and Rollo have become firm friends. Louis, being already settled at St Justin’s, was initially happy to take Rollo under his wing and show him the ropes, but now Rollo is definitely trying to turn the tables a bit in his favour by periodically reminding Louis that he’s a whole year older and in the class above Louis’s. Now that summer is here, they spend most of the time when they’re together outside in the garden, usually having water fights.
‘How’s it going?’ Saffy asks once the boys have changed into swimming trunks and had the usual lecture about not aiming for each other’s faces.
‘What do you think of this?’ Rebecca asks her, handing her the tablet.
‘Oh, that’s gorgeous,’ Saffy breathes, after she’s studied the pictures.
‘Isn’t it?’ Mum agrees.
‘It’s also bound to be a lot of work,’ I tell them before they can get too excited. ‘We’re supposed to be looking for something that doesn’t need too much doing to it, so we can cut our teeth and turn a quick profit, remember? I might be tempted if it came up after we’d already done five houses, but it’s way too much work for a first project.’
‘I reckon you’d make a killing on it though,’ Saffy tells me, undeterred. ‘Tim’s addicted to those property porn programmes on Channel 4, where experts help people find their ideal homes, and there was a converted watermill on one of those not that long ago. It was well over a million, and it wasn’t half as nice as this could be. Have a look online, there’s bound to be one for sale somewhere.’
With a sigh, I get up and perch on the arm of the sofa so I can see the screen. Rebecca has pretty much every property website bookmarked, so it doesn’t take her long to find a converted watermill for sale. It’s in Worcestershire and is on the market for just under two million pounds.
‘This is obviously the old mill building,’ she says as we look at pictures of a beautifully appointed kitchen with a light, airy bedroom above and a room that’s currently set up as a studio on the top floor. There are nods to the building’s industrial past in each room; the kitchen has a massive cog mounted on a plinth at one end, and the studio still has a part of the mill machinery suspended from the ceiling beams. The rest of the house has also been sympathetically upgraded, keeping the period features but with modern touches.
‘It is nice,’ I agree. ‘But how much do you think we’d have to spend to get the other one to that standard? Show it to me again.’
Rebecca switches back to the auction listing and hands me the tablet.
‘Right, for starters, you’ve either got to remove all this heavy machinery in the mill, or relocate it. That’s not going to be cheap.’ I swipe through the photos until we get to some of the house. ‘This has potential, I’ll admit. Wait a minute, is that a coal-fired range in the kitchen?’
‘It’s just a cooker,’ Saffy observes. ‘You could take it out and replace it easily enough.’
‘I bet it isn’t just a bloody cooker. Ten to one it’s the cooker, central heating and hot water system all in one. So you’ve got to start from scratch with that, putting in a modern boiler, radiators and all the pipework to join them together. The windows look rotten too, and what the hell are you going to do with the outbuildings, the barns and all that land?’
‘I don’t think you’d need to do anything to the barns apart from clear them out and spruce them up a bit,’ Rebecca argues. ‘The new owners can decide what they want to use them for. And the land can just be parkland. That’s privacy, and people will pay a lot for that, I reckon. I’m not saying it isn’t a bigger job than we were originally planning, but Saffy’s right. The profit potential is also much higher.’
I study the pictures some more. It’s a world away from what I thought our first project would be, but she has got a point. And, on the plus side, the house may be ridiculously outdated with rotten windows, but it does look structurally solid. I zoom in and can’t spot any nasty telltale cracks in any of the walls.
‘It’s scary, but also tempting,’ I say to Rebecca after a while. ‘Do you think there might be a bidding war though? We might not even get a look-in.’
‘We definitely won’t get a look-in if we don’t even try.’
‘OK. Let’s look at it in more depth and make a list, shall we?’ I grab my pad and move to sit next to Rebecca so we can examine the pictures together. Sensing that the entertainment is over, Saffy and Mum wander off to supervise the boys.
‘I can’t see a radiator anywhere,’ I observe after a while. ‘We’d definitely need to put central heating in.’ I make a note on my pad.
An hour or so later, we’ve got a list that includes installing the heating, replacing the rotten-looking wood-framed windows with new ones, putting in a new bathroom upstairs and ripping out the old ground-floor one. Rebecca thinks we should relocate the kitchen into the mill, like the converted one we looked at earlier, and we’ve decided we’re more than capable of ripping the old one out ourselves, although we’ve budgeted for some replastering afterwards.
‘Forty thousand so far, give or take,’ Rebecca observes.
‘That’s pretty good, but the big unknown is still the cost of converting the mill, and getting that wheel removed isn’t going to be cheap. I wonder where you go to get estimates for something like that?’
‘Why remove it? You could make it a feature. You know the buckets on a water wheel? You could fill them on one side with soil and then have flowers cascading over them. Like a nod to its past.’
‘Wouldn’t it just rotate and dump all the soil on the ground?’
‘You’d have to fix it so it couldn’t move, obviously.’
‘It’s a nice idea, but it’s probably just as rotten as the windows,’ I tell her. ‘I wouldn’t get your hopes up too high. Let’s budget to either remove or renovate it.’
‘OK,’ she agrees. ‘Here’s the thing though. Even if we had to spend, I don’t know, ￡200,000 on the conversion, that’s a total outlay of a million. If we only sold it for ￡1.25 million, that’s still a clear quarter of a million in profit, and I reckon we could make more than that if we do this well. What do you think?’
I ponder the question for a while. There’s no doubt that it’s a much bigger project than either of us were looking for, but the more I look at it, the more potential I see.
‘Here’s how I see it,’ I tell her eventually. ‘We could do what we originally planned but, as you showed with that house in Ashford earlier, there aren’t the margins in those types of houses. Yes, this is riskier, but I agree with you that it has the potential to make us a fortune if we play our cards right. Let’s go and look at it, at least. If we decide it’s too much for us, we can always walk away.’
Rebecca looks like she’s won the lottery, and I have to confess that I feel quite excited myself.
My buoyant mood sinks a little as we bump down the rough track to the mill a few days later. ‘This will all need replacing too,’ I point out to Rebecca. ‘I’d never get my car down here.’
‘You’re right,’ she agrees. ‘Add it to the list. What’s the name of the guy we’re meeting?’
‘Ben Simmonds.’
As we lurch around the final bend and pull up outside the house, a man steps out of the Land Rover that’s already parked there.
‘Well, hello, future husband,’ Rebecca murmurs as she drinks him in with her eyes. She’s almost salivating.
‘Are you all right there?’ I laugh.
‘Oh, never better. I mean, you’ve seen him, haven’t you? I always thought Rollo would be an only child, but I swear I can hear my ovaries singing that song from Snow White .’
‘What, “Someday My Prince Will Come”?’
‘No. “Heigh-Ho, It’s Off to Work We Go”.’
I study the man for a moment, trying to work out what’s got Rebecca so worked up. He is good looking, in a rough and ready kind of way. He’s tall, with wavy dark brown hair and dark eyes. He has a bushy beard, wide shoulders and his checked shirt is rolled up to reveal thick forearms. He’s pleasantly rugged, I suppose, but I can’t get past the beard. I’ve never been into beards.
‘Shall we get out of the car then?’ I prompt after a moment.
‘Yes, of course.’
‘Hi. You must be Rebecca and Thea. I’m Ben,’ the man says. He has a deep, resonant voice and his hand is so large that it completely engulfs Rebecca’s and mine in turn.
‘I’m Rebecca,’ she announces. ‘Before you ask, Thea and I are purely business partners and friends.’
Ben looks momentarily confused, which I don’t blame him for at all.
‘I see,’ he tells her. ‘Well, I’ve got the house key if you want to look in there first.’ As he turns away, crossing the courtyard to unlock the door, Rebecca leans close to me so she can whisper without him hearing.
‘Oh, shit,’ she murmurs. ‘Did I make a tit of myself? I think my knickers just melted. Does he come with the house, do you suppose?’
‘Behave,’ I snigger. ‘Do I need to hose you down before we go in?’
‘No.’ She pulls herself up straight. ‘Professional game face on. Ready?’
We follow Ben into the house, which is cold even on this warm summer day. He obviously notices me shivering as he says, ‘It’s the thick stone walls. They keep you cool in the summer and, once you get some heat into them, they’ll keep you warm in winter too. My house is just the same.’
‘Do you live locally then?’ Rebecca asks.
‘In the cottage at the end of the drive.’
So much for professional game face. Rebecca looks like all her Christmases have come at once.
‘Did you know the previous owners?’ I ask, keen to keep the conversation focused on the property while Rebecca tries to recover her composure.
‘Very well. They were my grandparents. My mum and dad were, well, they weren’t good parents so I grew up here. However, my grandad died two years ago and Nan passed away just after Christmas, so it’s time to move it on to someone new.’
‘I’m so sorry,’ I tell him.
‘Don’t be. Frankly, I’m surprised she lasted as long as she did after Grandad died. They were devoted to each other and she was lost without him.’
‘How come you’re not taking it on?’ I ask after a moment.
‘Lots of reasons. The main one is that I’m not the only heir, so I’d have to buy the others out. Plus, and I probably shouldn’t say this to prospective buyers, it’s an awkward size.’
‘How so?’
‘Ten acres. Too much for a garden but not enough for a farm. Grandad used to mow it with a tractor and Nan tried to keep the place neat after he died by letting one of the local farmers graze his sheep here, but the pittance he paid wasn’t even enough to maintain the fences, so that petered out last summer.’
‘Have you had a lot of viewings?’
He smiles. ‘How am I supposed to answer that? I have a vested interest.’
‘It’ll all come out at the auction anyway.’
‘I guess so. A few people have come to look, but I don’t know whether they’ll bid. What are your plans, if you don’t mind me asking?’
‘We’re going to convert it into a modern home but keep the period features,’ Rebecca blurts before I have the chance to stop her. ‘You don’t mind, do you?’
He laughs. ‘Why would I mind?’
‘Because this is your family home.’
‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ he tells her. ‘I’m a realist. I know this place is hopelessly outdated, and I reckon Nan and Grandad would have been happy to see it renovated. Knock yourselves out. Now, why don’t I wait in the car while you have a good look round. I’m sure you’ll want to talk without an eavesdropper. When you’re ready, I’ll show you the mill and the grounds if you like.’
‘Thanks,’ I tell him.
‘Sorry,’ Rebecca says as soon as he’s gone. ‘I don’t know what’s the matter with me today.’
‘Really? I reckon I have a pretty good idea,’ I tell her with a grin.
‘Oh, bollocks, I think I’m in love,’ she replies.