Casa Marta... The house that almost was...

Rewind back to January, after our first week of settling in we contacted estate agents and got started with our house search. Our initial plan was to look for a small property with big land, hoping to set up an eco lodge/campsite type of situation. As we started our search, we quickly realised that in order to get the type of land we were looking for within our budget, we would have to go quite deep into the mountains, where it was absolutely gorgeous but fairly isolated. We both agreed that whilst the plan looked amazing on paper, the reality of trying to start a new life, getting integrated into the community, and plonking ourselves on top of a hill an hour from civilisation wasn’t going to work, so…we changed the plan.

After narrowing down the location of our search, the properties started to change…We saw our fair share of ruins - turning up to properties that looked nothing like the photos we had been shown, as we found out they were actually taken 10 years ago, you know when the house still had a roof, and the tree growing through the middle hadn’t moved in yet… We were starting to *mildly panic that our dream was going to stay a dream and we didn’t have the budget to make it work, when our estate agent took us to Martas.

I’ll preface this segment with a little bit of background on how house hunting has gone for us in the past.. We see a house, we decide this is the best house ever, we ignore anything that could possibly be wrong with it, and we put an offer in! I suppose luckily for us each time some sort of interruption has broken our impulse and we haven’t gone through with the purchases, but it’s pretty much the same story with this place.

The property was massive, with a small garden to the front, and a parcel of land sold with it just to the right across a lane. Immediately we had transformed it in our heads into 3 luxury rental apartments for hiking/biking tours and a separate living space for us downstairs. It was a beautiful building and one that we spent over a month putting in the research to try to make work, we were sold that this was going to be our future home! Our first battle was finding out if we could make it into apartments, there are different departments that you have to get permission from in order to turn a property into “apartamentos rurales” - (rural holiday apartments). After getting the nod from who we needed nods from, we turned our attention to how we could divide the house into the four apartments, we spoke with a couple of architects who both told us “its a big place”.. we took this as a compliment and carried along on our way…

At the same time we had been talking with Clare - the amazing woman we had been renting our cottage from, she had nothing but time for us and our never ending questions, and one bit of advice she would keep telling us was to “keep looking” even when you think you’ve found it… keep looking. This wasn’t really like us, as mentioned before, when we’re in, we’re all in! But being real grown ups we did decide to take her advice, and happily accepted a lift out to a property that she had seen online. (spoiler- this ended up being our house!)

The very next day quotes started to come in for Martas’ house…. They weren’t small numbers… The biggest expense was the roof, the whole thing needed replacing.. not good news as it would eat up essentially our entire budget. We took a couple of days to let everything sink in, and together acknowledged it was a case of amazing potential but not the one for us just yet.

Who knows… Maybe in 5/10 years we’ll be in the position to make it work, but for now we are very grateful we accepted the lift from Clare that day, took her advice and ended up with the right property for us… you know one with a brand new roof….