Page 34 of The Do-Over

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. Thewindows 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 And, on the plus side, the house may be ridiculously outdated with rotten windows, but it does look structurally solid.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.

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