A couple who bought a house on Homes Under the Hammer are facing a nightmare despite buying the property for just £15,000.
The daytime renovation and home improvement show, which started back in 2003, follows the story of people who buy homes at auction that are still classed as ‘fixer-uppers’.
From the late 2010s onwards, presenters Martin Roberts, Dion Dublin, Martel Maxwell, and Jacqui Joseph started revisiting unfinished properties bought in previous episodes.
One of the couples who appeared on the show for a second time after buying a property years before were Graham and Lima, who bought one of the cheapest houses in the show’s history in 2014.
For only £14,500, Graham and Lima purchased a one-bedroom property in the borough county of Blaenau Gwent, just 25 miles north of Cardiff.
The house, in Brynmawr, was in a significant state of disrepair, and the guide price was even lower at £8,000 – presenter Martin called it ‘dodgy’ when he went to visit.
‘What you’ve got is this one room, upstairs, but I think I’ll avoid because those stairs look really, really dodgy. [And] believe it or not, the only toilet and bathroom facility on the property [is outside].’
However, Graham and Lima pressed on with their budget of £25,000 and took no help, aiming to fix the house themselves as a long-term project.
Lima said at the time that she could paint, shift rubbish, and make cups of tea, while Graham said he was focusing on timber, floor boards, and site management.
However, costs soon shot up when an archeological survey was performed, and then a firm tasked with rebuilding parts of the housewent into administration.
When Homes Under the Hammer returned to the site years later, what they found shocked the presenters and left Graham and Lima’s financial future ‘ruined’.
Lima described the situation: ‘From the very beginning it was Graham’s baby, he’s finished it to his own vision. Overall, I think we spent around £90,000, possibly a bit more.’
That means the couple went £65,000 over budget in their efforts to turn the property round and make it worth something, but things didn’t go to plan there either.
The value of the property only rose to between £55,000 and £60,000, meaning that Graham and Lima made a loss of more than £30,000 overall.
Once dubbed ‘the cheapest house in Britain’ after being sold for just £14,500, the terraced Brynmawr property was eventually restored and still stands today.
However, the whole experience meant that Graham and Lima were left ‘devastated’ in the end, and no records for the house are available on Rightmove after the year 2015.
It remains unclear whether Graham and Lima were able to sell the property on afterwards, and it’s also not known how much they managed to sell it for.
Watch Homes Under the Hammer on the BBC.
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