Houses with attached barns to renovate

OML it’s windy! I live in an on-the-edge (in all ways) bit of the UK so we do get all the weather all the days, but this week’s dog walks have been a real test of mine and the hound’s core strength.
Anyway I’m home, with the radio, hot coffee and a sleeping greyhound, and ready to show you my picks for this week - two cozy-potential wrecks for weathering storms.
Starting with this super-cute cottage in the Scottish Highlands.
Scotland does weather, and its Highlands and Islands homes are classically wide and squat, solid and hunkered in their exposed landscape.
What they do less well is “modernising” those homes. Like this one, replacing heavy wooden doors with plastic ones, covering permeable stone walls with moisture-trapping concrete render. It’s something I’ve been banging on about through two decades of 'Wreck'.
The cottage is in a small crofting community, just outside the small port town of Aultbea. It is in an absolutely beautiful part of the world, with views of the sea but up a hill and along a lane from it.

Downstairs is the living room, separate dining room, galley kitchen and rear porch. Upstairs two loft bedrooms and a bathroom.

The rooms downstairs would benefit from some reshaping, plenty of scope to merge the dining room and kitchen for example, even if you didn't want to integrate that almost-attached stone bothan (bothy).

Outside, as well as that bothan there's a less solid-looking byre and the property comes with half-an-acre of land plus small garden areas to the front and back and parking space. 
All in all, a gorgeous detached cottage with outbuildings and land, on the market at offers over £150k.
Details and more pictures through the agent, Bell Ingram, on their site here and on Rightmove here.

My next pick is also a chunky stone house with a barn and views, but 352 miles south of Aultbea.
This three-storey house in the Lake District is in the centre of the quiet village of Helton, a mile from popular Askham and around five miles from Penrith.

The house is on the market for cash buyers only given the "renovation" that needs doing, but more probably given the unlikelihood of getting a mortgage on that undercroft/basement area. This property needs a buyer and a builder who knows what they're doing.

But crikey it has potential. I'm completely in love with its gardens and the views from the rear are just gorgeous.

The ground floor has a large kitchen, through lounge and hall. Upstairs are three bedrooms (one quite small) and a bathroom.

The basement has two big rooms/stores, accessed from those garden doors and from the kitchen.
I'll be honest, that basement scares me, not because of the work needed but because I've watched way too many films starring evil basements.
There's also a large - very large - double-height attached barn and, all in all, a lot of walls for the money.

On the market with a (cash only) guide price of £400k through Britton Estates. Details and more pictures and video on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.
I was thinking I might finish with a scary basement video, but that wouldn't be fair to the property - or to you, perhaps. Instead, I'll finish with the magnificent Kate out on the wily, windy Moors.

And, for Wuthering Heights fans everywhere, a reminder that the 2026 Most Wuthering Heights Day will take place across dozens of locations globally in July. Get your red frock out : )

Homes with old or new business potential

Well, here I go again stepping outside of my usual picks for 'Wreck', but in a world in flux there's power in flex. Which is a pretty pompous way of saying I've selected three semi-commercial properties for you this week instead of my usual detached wreck on a plot.
Of course live/work properties have been around forever and long, long before we started building them into planning categories. Half a century before I had my first garden office, my nana was baking her legendary breadcakes twice a week and selling them from her front door to queues of neighbours.
These three properties are many steps up from that sort of home working but all offer a more quirky challenge for renovators and lifestyle changers.
I'm going to start at the very top of the price and scale range with this large house plus possible holiday let plus museum plus tearoom plus gift shop plus six acres of land on Scotland's Isle of Mull.
Torr A’ Chlachainn House is an extended, detached house with three bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs (one ensuite) and a bedroom and bathroom within the downstairs extension. The rooms in the original house are bit small and awkward and could do with some rethinking, and obviously updating.

The Old Byre Heritage Centre is a large, two-storey building with tearoom and giftshop on the ground floor and the museum, on Mull's history and heritage, on the upper floor. It's cute, but no lift and accessibility is something you'll want to think about if you want to keep the museum (its contents will cost you extra).

There's an odd part-storage, part Ballamory-themed play area outbuilding, and the two storey, one-bedroom Wee Bothy. There are gardens, a field currently rented out for dog training, woodland and carparking.

On the market at offers over £695k through Bell Ingram, details and more pictures on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.
My next pick is a house with attached bakery and baker's shop in the lovely North Yorkshire village of Reeth, in Swaledale.

And, so we're clear, those are breadcakes on that counter. Not rolls, not barmcakes, not baps.
The house itself is pretty chunky - four bedrooms and two bathrooms upstairs; sitting room and two kitchens downstairs, plus a small dining room that's been turned into a (sort-of) tea room.

Next to that is the shop plus the bakery and prep room, with a courtyard garden and stone outbuilding.
Again, not the best configuration if you want to continue the bakery and tearoom business (you've got competition) and you could definitely do much more with all that upstairs space.

However, it's in a good, central position in a popular Yorkshire Dales village, so lots of potential.
On the market at offers over £315k through Alderson Estate Agents. Details and more pictures on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.
The final property I want to show you is has the lowest price but the biggest challenge. Hell, it's current planning permission means you can't even live there yourself - you'll be renovating it as a holiday let. Maybe you could do something heritage-tourist or eco-business with the ground floor..??

It's a 16th century ex-watermill in the Cumbrian Lake District. Very, very beautiful on the outside, very much a wreck on the inside.

Widewath Mill isn't listed but that hasn't prevented Lake District National Park planners from setting some pretty tough conditions - it's taken three years for this project to get approved.
On the upside, you do at least know that everyone who could possibly get to comment has had their say, including the bats.
The plans are designed to protect the mill's mechanics and gubbins while wrapping around a high-end one bedroom holiday let. The two-storey mill plus separate stone barn sits on a long, narrow plot that includes the section of river feeding the mill.
So, we're talking carefully renovating a non-mortgageable but beautiful bit of Cumbrian industrial heritage in a protected area of countryside and then charging others to holiday there.
On the market at a cash buyer only guide price of £200k via David Britton. Details, videos and pictures on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.  

Three properties to hide away in

Well, this is turning into quite the week, again. Any of you feeling the need to run away and hide from this new world ordering? Then follow me...
Whittle Dene is a collaborative community living in 10, mostly handbuilt, cabins in the middle of 12 acres of Northumberland wood inhabited by fairies (maybe).
This cabin, Stanhope, was built in 1927 and the cluster of cabins has existed in Whittle Burn Woods since the 1900s. It is a historic site in the middle of ancient woodland, cared for and protected by volunteers and residents. And obviously pretty rare for one of the cabins to come onto the market.
Here's some pictures before we go further.

Stanhope is off-grid to the extent that electricity is provided by its solar panels and back-up generator, heating by log burner, hot water by Calor gas boilers and water is mains fed. So, as long as you don't rock up with your Android or Apple smartphone, you're fairly hidden from those maddening crowds.
Outside are three garden areas with fruit trees, a geo dome that could become a greenhouse, and chicken coop. Boundaries between cabins are "fluid" - an incentive to work your plot.

There are two complications for any of you thinking weekend getaway rather than lifestyle choice - access and lease restrictions.
No car access - it's a walk through the woods. You're buying the leasehold (not freehold) and that has been on a rolling one-year lease for 100 years. The current lease holder is trying to see if that can be changed to a more market-normalised 20 year lease. The lease only allows 51 weeks of the year occupation - you have to spend Boxing Day to New Year's Day somewhere else.
Complications aside, this is a very special cabin in a very special wood offering a pretty exceptional escape to a more nature-led life shared with a handful of like-minded neighbours.

On the market at offers over £125k (leasehold) through GFW, details and more pictures on the agent's website here and on UK Land and Farms site here.
My next pick to show you is a more traditional remote cottage. Cefn Coch is a two-bedroom Welsh cottage surrounded by fields and farms and sitting pretty much on its own on a winding set of lanes.

It has a gated and hedged garden, parking and privacy.

Downstairs is the lounge, kitchen and a bathroom/shower room. Upstairs are two bedrooms.
It's not big, but there's space to extend and if you were able to buy up part of the neighbouring fields you'd have a pretty good size smallholding.

The nearest village (Llanrhaeadr-ym-Mochnant) is couple of miles away, the nearest town (Oswestry) about 10 miles.
The downside is the cottage is up for online auction with a Buyer Premium of 5%. Which means that whatever you 'win' the house for at auction, you'll pay an extra 5% on top of that price to the estate agent. Plus all your other legal fees, renovation costs etc.
You already know I'm not a fan of UK agents' rush to auction properties - it basically means the buyer pays their own costs and the costs the seller would normally have paid. Often more.

Cefn Coch is up for auction on 25th February with a guide price of £150k through Town and Country Properties. Details and more pictures on the agent's site here and on Rightmove here.

And my last property to show you is definitely, definitely not my usual pick. Not even sure it counts as a property.
Here is the 30 acre island of Eilean Mor, in Loch Sunart in the Scottish Highlands.

It's uninhabited. Access is by boat or over the causeway at low tide.
There is no planning permission in place (yet?) and the island sits within the Sunart Site of Special Scientific Interest (SSSI) and Sunart Special Area of Conservation (SAC) - which means dealing with Nature Scot and the umbrella body the Joint Nature Conservation Committee.
But it is a whole, and a wholly beautiful, island for sale.
On the market at offers over £275k through Bell Ingram. Details and more pictures on the agents site here.