22 Foxhole East

f0xh0les · 12 August 2016 at 1:55PM

I just made my first mortgage overpayment.

We bought a 5 bed Victorian terraced house in the East Midlands in April 16 that has been badly neglected. It needs everything doing, it has been let out on a room by room basis and used as a rental machine. Now it is our family house (4 kids = one bedroom each!!).

So far I have replaced 2 Velux on the attic floor so the rain stays on the outside (very rotten frames)

Have had a full electrical rewire as the wiring was underneath the wallpaper - not boxed or chased in, just behind the wallpaper and skirting boards. Got a shiny certificate and everything now!

Decorated 4 kids bedrooms and put down new carpets in 3 of them

On the still to do list for this year

- new roof and insulation - nails degrading! Snow could cause a huge problem. Better get it sorted really.

- New shower and bathroom flooring - water damage, holes in floors (!) we should have moved the bath mats when we were viewing, they hid a lot of damage.

Plastering and decorating.

Nice carpets!!

Shelves!

That will be the two top floors done and I can kid myself I am 2/3rds of the way finished:rotfl:

Not attempting anything on the ground floor until 2017 - so no talk of log burners,knocking down walls, kitchens, damp proof courses, shower rooms or the like. That way lies madness, shhhhh, next year, at some point...

So, let's talk money.
House cost £160,000
Deposit was £41,315 (sale of previous nasty Manchester Foxhole)
Amount borrowed £118,685

We got a 1.94 % fixed for 2 years with Accord which rises to something ridiculous like 7% so remortgage time in 2018

We will repay £1.82 for every £1 borrowed over the 26.5 year life of the mortgage unless I overpay

I have just rung Accord, found out I can repay up to 10% of the total amount borrowed (each year without penalty), can make as many overpayments as I like per month without penalty, but cannot check on the balance online. I have to ring up a silly automated 0345 number that will tell me what the balance is! I will have to remember to ring it on my mobile so it is free.

Monthly Mortgage repayment £467.00:j
An overpayment of £200 a month would knock 10.5 years off the life of the mortgage.

We are planning on spending 5 years living here, and them moving elsewhere due to the nature of DH's work. So, lets see how much I can throw at this mortgage.

newgirly · 12 August 2016 at 2:06PM

Hi foxholes, welcome to the mfw board

Congratulations on the new house, sounds like you have a lot of work to do still, but I am sure you will get there!

Best of luck

MallyGirl · 12 August 2016 at 2:24PM

Sounds like our previous house - at the time family and friends thought we were insane to spend £165k on a house that one of them described as 'a hard hat zone'! We sold it 8 years later for £415k so it is worth putting in the effort if you can.
We did not have our daughter when we started, just cats.
We had the basement tanked, replaced the bathroom including installing a shower cubicle, replaced the boiler and moved it to basement. We then fitted a basic kitchen and the washing machine/tumble down there making it into a utility room. In the kitchen we removed the backburner that was the only way of heating the water, knocked out the outside loo to make the room bigger, knocked out the bottom of the chimney (keeping the sides) to take the cooker, and then fitted a kitchen as it just had a free standing table before and no units at all.
We removed all the storage heaters and fitted gas fires in the Victorian fireplaces that we found behind the storage heaters. We had a total rewire and had central heating fitted. Absolutely everything needed repainting and it was new carpets or laminate throughout.
We moved to our next (current) house when DD was 4.
It needed nothing doing! Since then we have replaced both bathroom and ensuite, converted the old coachhouse at the bottom of the garden into home office/granny annexe, knocked out the kitchen wall and built a massive orangery on the back. Glad it didn't need any work!!!!

f0xh0les · 12 August 2016 at 2:49PM

Well the house next door is valued at £40k+ more than ours, and the layout is pretty similar, we are in a terrace, and although ours needs a lot of work it is not £40k's worth! There is a bit of re-development going on close by, an old victorian warehouse type thing is being converted into flats, sorry, luxury apartments with huge windows and silly shaped rooms, but they seem to be selling well, and it is within 10 mins walk of both Leicester and De Montford Universities, so resale should not be a problem. We are just on the 'wrong' side of the road to a very desirable neighbourhood. Tbh we could not afford a 3 bed on the right side of the road, for an extra 2 bedrooms and £20k in the bank, I will happily wait for the green man to flash.

MallyGirl · 12 August 2016 at 3:34PM

absolutely. We could not have afforded that house if it had not been in such a state. You could pull handfuls of plaster out of the basement walls as it was so damp down there!
Neighbourhoods change over time - we are near Reading University which is a good thing in terms of area.

f0xh0les · 17 August 2016 at 2:51PM

I just worked out our interest on this 1.94% for the next 20 months is £6.16 a day. A DAY! Every day!:eek:

I am only going to be chucking a sneaky £20/£50 overpayment at it once or twice a month, I am a SAHM but with 4 DS it would not be worth my while working unless I picked up a 10-2 job term-time while they were at school.
That will no doubt come, after I have organised a new roof and redecorated the rest of the top two floors, as I need to look like I am in employment for when we come to swap mortgage products.;)

We had a terrible time trying to get the mortgage in the first place. We only went with a broker as they would have a relationship with the lenders already and we knew we were going to look bad on paper as we have one income (40+k ) me at home and 4 children - so 5 unwaged dependents. And then, even though we had a mortgage for 10 years, it seems DH has no credit history whatsoever - we think he must have fallen down the financial equivalent of the back of the fridge:rotfl:. He just does not exist! So he is spending the next 18 months building a credit history - he has a credit card - his first ever at 41. He hates it already. He has also taken out more products with the bank he has banked with for the last 18 years. He is disgusted that because he has not had debt he is considered a risk. But hopefully this will all be resolved soon, he is on the electoral role, has new savings accounts, new credit card, and we are trying to make sure all his cards are in exactly the same name. The invisible man is going to be revealed.

I save us all so much money by not working, cooking from scratch, shopping in 10 different places, and being frugal and financially savvy. :money:

We made sure when we took out this mortgage that if it all went t*ts up we could afford to run the house on the child benefit/tax credits alone, as we have had to do that before for a year, about 5 years ago, but that is a tale for another day.

So, the first goal is to get below the £115k's by December, and to have a new shower and bathroom floor in place and working before the dreaded in-laws visit in October - I have just been promoted to the role of SATAN in their little family pantomine. Sadly I will have to buy my own cape and trident. :rotfl:

Enjoy the sunshine while it's shiny.

f0xh0les · 29 August 2016 at 3:38PM

Back from a lovely holiday in Norfolk - very cheap YHA by the sea - 4 days £99, and wall to wall sunshine. Plus only one tantrum from only one DS!! Minor miracle.

All 4DSs back to school tomorrow, so I will have time to get sorted and get on with some DIY tasks and quotes for the bathroom refit.

Just cut the front hedge for the first time (not a euphemism - it's a privet:rotfl:).

I have a cordless trimmer bought back when I did the Nielson shopping survey thing about 9 years ago. I miss that, I should try and get back on to it, the things you can get with your points are supposed to be much better now than before. I ended up with two strimmers and two hedge trimmers just to get rid of the points.:p

Sad that the summer holidays are over. I will miss them when they are back at school

Bobarella · 29 August 2016 at 9:38PM

Hi Foxholes
I saw your name come up on the main forum heading bit for this section and thought I'd pop on, I dont normally come in here

I am green with envy at the cost of your place, it sounds incredible!
I have honestly had thoughts lately about relocating so we could buy mortgage free but how do you randomly pick up a life and do that? One to muse on the coming winter evenings. But in all seriousness good luck with your place, you will have a beautiful family home in no time.

Bob

f0xh0les · 30 August 2016 at 4:13PM

The house itself is a bit of a mess, it was rented on a room by room basis and has not had much done to it, so it all needs replastering, new roof, new doors, damp proof at the back, tarting up etc etc etc, but the space is brilliant, all the boys have their own rooms (even if two are small, so are the youngest two - 6 & 8), and there are 2 reception rooms, but only a yard at the back, not a garden, but the pots of herbs are doing well, and we have sunflowers and some green beans cos of the kids' classroom experiments that have come home with them.

I have a bad habit of picking up my life and moving Bobs, I started out in Vauxhall (8 yrs), then moved to Penge (SE London 10 yrs), then uni in Wolverhampton (4 yrs), 2 years in Leipzig, back to Wolverhampton for 3 years , down to Portsmouth for a year, then to Salford for 10 years, bought and sold our first house (3 bed ex council semi - front and back gardens and garage! - £77k) and had 4 kids, then 9 months in Sheffield and now Leicester. So all 4 kids swapped schools 3 times in 18 months (eek - bad mum!), but they don't really seem to mind and all the schools I found were either Good or Excellent according to OFSTED. I did offer them boarding school but luckily they said 'no way'. yeah, like we could afford boarding school!!!!!!

Prices in London are absolutely crazy, to the point where there are some people who commute from Leicester as it is about an hour's train journey. DH works in the Uni so we will probably be here for about 4-5 yrs before we head somewhere else. I have learnt from experience, the closer we can live to DH's workplace the happier the whole house is. Commuting makes him so grumpy.

Bobarella · 30 August 2016 at 4:18PM

Wow that really is some list of moves. How have you chosen the places out of interest?

f0xh0les · 30 August 2016 at 4:58PM

Where ever the next job is, that is where we go.
We have no immediate family left in the UK as they have all moved elsewhere due to work, or inclination, so we can go where we please really. His parents were not happy when he told them he had applied for a job in Australia though.

But I have to say Sheffield was my favourite, the kids loved it too. Big enough to be a city, but a 10 minute drive from the Peaks, I would not be sad to go back, but the job that was on the cards dissolved suddenly and this job popped up and he got it so here we are.

I think he had interviews in Belfast, Sheffield, Leicester, Birmingham and Exeter all in the space of a fortnight - it is just one of those things, all the jobs come up at the same time for start the next term, but this one is permanent - well, as permanent as we ever are.

22 Foxhole East

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