Like the title says, I bought a derelict garage in Wales. This is it - photo taken on a very grey morning in January 2019, when I first saw the place in real life, as opposed to pictures on the estate agent's website:
(It now looks slightly less derelict than that...the operative word being 'slightly'. But I'm getting there!)
I have a collection of interestingly rusty old cars, but I've never had anywhere of my own to keep them. I live in a terraced house in west London with no driveway and no garage. Some days I can't even find a parking space on the street. I've rented various lock-ups over the years (in fact I've still got one...for now), but I've never had any proper work space, so I've never been able to do much with the cars.
I've had a vague idea in my head for a long time that the way forward might be to buy a place, rather than forking out rent for cramped and basic lock-ups. A few years ago I decided to pursue this idea seriously, so I set out on a long and often frustrating search for some sort of shed, barn, garage, workshop - anything, really.
I wasn't fussy. I didn't have enough money to be fussy.
The trouble is, the kind of commercial property I was looking for (cheap and ramshackle, basically) doesn't really exist around London. Any likely-looking premises tend to be snapped up by developers and turned into residential property of one sort or another. So I realised I would have to look outside London - and a long way out, too. I ended up making my search area wider and wider, and getting further and further away from home.
Of course, the obvious question is - why not just move house, and buy somewhere with a drive, a garage, maybe some land around it? But neither my wife nor I want to move. We like being on the edge of London. I've toyed with the idea of moving out - I grew up in Gloucestershire, but I think we'd both go a bit stir crazy if we moved permanently into the wilds.
So a big, cheap shed a long way off was going to suit me better than something small and expensive closer to home.
I mainly looked at locations to the west of London. I know the West Country and parts of Wales quite well, and my house in west London is close to the M4/A40 and the main railway line to the west, so anywhere in that direction is easily accessible. A friend of mine lives in Kent, and found a few interesting-looking old workshops for sale in his area (parts of Kent do seem to be cheap...) but I just couldn't face the thought of slogging round the M25 every time I wanted to pop out to my garage. Travelling directly out of London to my old stamping grounds to the west seemed like a much better idea.
I only had a few rules: no leasehold properties (because that's just a glorified version of renting), no auctions (because the attractively cheap starting price you see in the adverts is never the price you pay), and it would be nice to have the option of getting there by public transport (because I don't necessarily want to drive everywhere).
I ended up looking at all sorts of derelict yards and grotty old sheds, and made lots of enquiries that didn't go anywhere. I learned that the very bottom end of the property market seems to be populated with Walter Mitty type characters who are acting out some sort of property tycoon fantasy, just because they've got an old shed up for sale. The one thing they don't want to do is sell their property. As soon as a potential buyer comes along, they run away like frightened rabbits.
Here are a few of my false starts. None of these came to anything, but it shows what sort of stuff is out there...
I actually got an offer accepted on this nice little yard in Minehead, Somerset. The sale was going ahead, the solicitors were talking to each other, only for the seller to pull out in a flurry of flimsy excuses. He claimed he was ill, but wouldn't even tell his own solicitor what was wrong with him.
The yard is just up the road from the West Somerset Railway station, not far from the beach. Planning permission for a house on the site had been turned down because it's next to a pub garden and a supermarket loading bay, and the Council thought the location would be too noisy for residential use. So the yard had to stay in commercial use, which helped to keep the price low. I could've been very happy there - the location, tucked away down an alley but still close to the town centre, was great. But Walter Mitty said no.
Apparently he was renting the yard to a friend who was using the place as a Talbot Express scrapyard, and I suspect the friend persuaded him not to sell. I think all the stuff about being ill was just window dressing.
Then there was this yard with fifteen - count 'em, fifteen - lock-up garages in Yeovil. The garages themselves were in very poor condition and the whole lot would probably need to be rebuilt, but it was a large site with lots of potential. Someone else (I suspect a developer) with cash in hand jumped in and grabbed the place while I was still trying to arrange a remortgage on my house. That was a lesson in itself - you've got to be able to move fast, because if you don't, someone else will.
Although the advert calls it a 'Development Opportunity' there was no planning permission for any kind of development on the site - if there had been, it would've been twice the price:
I also looked at this derelict farmyard on the outskirts of Newport, in South Wales. Although it looks like the countryside it falls within the City of Newport boundary. M4 junction 23a is just across the field. I put in an offer - and the seller's response was to immediately remove the property from the market. Was it something I said?
In fact I don't think he really wanted to sell at all. He was just looking for an offer to see what the place might be worth. It was a shame, because it had a decent amount of land with that rather lovely old stone barn, and a more modern steel-built Dutch barn nearby...all for the price of a normal double garage in London. Again, planning permission for residential development had been turned down, because Newport City Council wants to concentrate any development in the city itself (which frankly needs all the help it can get) rather than turning the surrounding countryside into suburban sprawl.
The neighbouring authority, Monmouthshire County Council, literally just over the hedge, doesn't seem so bothered about protecting the countryside. They seem to love a bit of sprawl. If this old farmyard was just a few yards further east I'm sure it would be a housing estate by now. But as it's in Newport, it's agricultural or commercial use only.
This massive old warehouse in Abergavenny was a possibility, but in the end I decided not to go ahead myself on this one. It's a huge place - a two storey main section with a lean-to garage alongside. Terrible condition, obviously - look at the twist on that brickwork. The trouble was, it didn't have any outside space of its own. It's in a yard behind some shops, and although I would have a right of access the yard itself was entirely given over to parking for the shops and flats above. I would've effectively been trapped inside the building, and overlooked by all the flats. So I gave it a pass.
In the end I discovered the garage I actually ended up buying by accident. One day, when I was doing my usual search through Rightmove, Zoopla, and all the other property websites, I forgot to enter 'South Wales' into the search field. I just put 'Wales' - which of course brought up everything. And in that fuzzy area where South Wales becomes mid-Wales I found this old garage - originally a blacksmith's forge, later a Yugo dealership, of all things, but disused and empty for the last few years.
Planning permission for residential conversion had been turned down, which was a good thing from my point of view: it made the place virtually worthless to a property developer, and cheap enough for me. Of course, it's mostly derelict, but it's in a surprisingly accessible location (three A roads pass nearby, there's a station down the road, it's even on a bus route), it has B2 planning permission and it's a massive space for the money.
So to cut a long story short, I bought it.
Here's another picture from January 2019, when I first saw the place in real life. I always made a point of going to see any likely-looking properties myself, without talking to estate agents first - I would just go and have a poke around to find out what the properties were really like. I was a little daunted by the grotty condition of this place at first, but the more I looked at it the more I thought, "This could work."
The sale was completed in July 2019, so as things stand I've been there for 6 months, working on the site whenever I can spare two or three days to get up there and do stuff.
Obviously it needs a lot of work, and it's not going to be a quick project. But the building is big enough to divide into two units (in fact the previous owner had more or less done that already) so my ultimate plan is to use half of it myself, and rent out the other half. But before I can do that, I have to stop it falling to bits...
I'll continue the story a bit later - and put up some photos of my cars, which are the reason I'm doing all this in the first place.
