The Dream of Bardmony…

We were snowed in, working from home in the teeny tiny office room in our early 1970s semi-detached house outside Bath, in early 2018 (yep, Beast from the East!), and I was enormously homesick. I’m originally from Minnesota, land of heavy snowfall for months of the year, and this was one of the only decent snowfalls I’d seen “stick” in England in nearly 10 years in the country.

I sighed heavily and began my regular seasonal moan about how winter isn’t really a proper winter in England, and pondered aloud whether Chris might ever consider a move further north, where we might have a better chance of snow.

To my surprise, he popped open a new tab in Chrome and fired up Rightmove. We started poking around in the north of England, more for fun and a bit of distraction from work (why don’t adults get snow days? Harumph!), but were pleasantly surprised by the variety of properties we found – particularly rural properties – within our price bracket. I was smitten.

We moved the search area further north, and clicked around a bit. We were now looking in Scotland. Wow, even better. Some of the houses we saw were beyond our wildest dreams in the south of England – and there were (as Chris would say) MOUNTAINS! Yay!

And then, we made the fatal mistake of increasing the upper end of our budget…

There she was. In all her summer-time glory, surrounded by yellow fields of rapeseed and trees upon trees upon trees: Bardmony House. The angels sang. (Not really – it was just Donut “mow”-ing for pets.) But in seriousness, it was an instant spark for both of us.

We couldn’t afford her, but dang, we could think about her. And talk about her. And we did. For ages. The house was too expensive for us by a long shot, but we talked about the space, the trees, the view, the history…

Our bosses will be pleased to know we did eventually return to work that day, having come to the sad realisation that, by the time we had sold our house and our investment property, and got our work ducks in a row, nothing as magical as Bardmony would still be available. We hadn’t even put our house on the market yet – AND (wrinkle!), Chris had never been to Scotland. We couldn’t genuinely plan such a move when one of us had never visited the country, and it would be months before we were ready to make such a leap, if not years. It was just a lovely dream. Sad face.

Fast forward a year, and we were still talking about Bardmony. The house and Scotland were ever-present topics of conversation for us – neither of us could get the dream of space and a historic property out of our heads. I had also managed to bring Chris for an exploratory trip, and he, like me, had fallen head over heels for the country.

We decided to start making plans to move up. Even if Bardmony wasn’t available, we were sure we could find something that we would love. WE WERE DOING IT.

The next 6 months flew by – we renovated and sold the investment property and put our house on the market in late November of 2019. We accepted an offer in less than a week, and booked a last minute flight up for a weekend to view properties.

You, dear reader, given the content of this blog, will be unsurprised to learn that, for reasons we still do not understand (even less so having the benefit of hindsight and experience of living at the house ourselves), Bardmony remained unsold. And, luckily for us, the price had come down over the 18 months since we first found it online.

Bardmony was our third viewing of the weekend – we saved it for last, as it was the most expensive of the lot, and we were hoping we’d fall in love with one of the less expensive houses (hah, unlikely if you know me at all 😉 ).

We were very late to view it, as the second viewing had run over the timeslot we had allotted, and we were so glad that the agents agreed to wait for us. We arrived just as the sun was setting and the sky was full of pinks and yellows. The day had been cold and the frost was still on the grass.

We found the gorgeous old gates for the property, and turned on the drive. It was instant for me. I knew, without doubt, that this house had to be ours. I told Chris that I would do anything for us to have Bardmony as our forever home, and struggled to remain cool in front of the agent. Of course, we didn’t want to give away how desperate we were for the house…! But I spent the whole viewing with bubbles of excitement in my tummy and struggling to keep my voice quiet as I pointed out my favourite bits to Chris.

Needless to say, we were total goners for the house. We spent a few weeks over Christmas trying to convince ourselves otherwise – this was at the very tippy-top of our budget, and we were nervous about pulling the trigger – but in the end, we knew this was where we belonged.

We made our offer in January, and though COVID-19 slowed the purchase down a little, we moved in at the end of July.

So, there you have it – that is how we came to find and buy Bardmony House!