In October last year our house search was continuing but had hit a stumbling block. Every house we had seen that was reasonable had a bad lot – next to a road, next to new construction, too small. So we made the decision to expand our search to include small farms, thinking they would at least do better on the lot.

We found the SAFER, a semi-government agency which deals in farm usage and sales, and registered our needs with them. But before we visited our first farm we found one more round of houses. They had interesting characteristics, but they all had issues. The housing market will always be overrun with bad houses because of two factors: 1) bad houses take way longer to sell and 2) bad houses are likely to be sold more often. Most houses might be good houses but they rarely come to market and if they do they sell right away. People recognize quality and these houses weren’t quality enough.

This is the first, probably the best built of the houses we saw that day.

 

 

This house was interesting, but with water some damage. This is a common issue here where houses aren’t properly set up to remove water. There are often gutter issues or concrete aprons that turn the rock walls into water syphons. In this case the courtyard outside didn’t drain properly and pooled with water.

The house had interesting roof joinery:

 

 

And well built walls:

 

 

But the overall damage to the walls was too much for us to take on as a risk.

 

 

I did like the colors of the old bedding. Pity about the walls.

 

 

The owner hadn’t realized there was an economic crisis and wanted a lot of money for his place. He also had a little land to sell to go with it, but he wanted way too much for that too. We had already been browsing the SAFER site and had got some idea as to the value of land here and knew when we had hit a seller with dollar signs in his eyes. Sayonara, white house.