Cottage Academy: A Brief Brush with the Bank
While the sale was going through, I had to figure out how to fund the restoration
Clacking across the tiled floor of a city bank I had a cheque in my fist and I was happy. I had big plans for that cheque. It could go towards the cost of a half-door perhaps. Or an old-fashioned fisherman’s light for outside.
“Do you need a loan?” A smiling man called out as I passed by. I looked around. Was he talking to me? I did of course need a loan. But this was not part of the plan. As a freelancer with no stability I’d long written off the option of a mortgage.
“Actually yes I could do with a loan,” I said.
“Great! What kind of a loan do you need?”
“I need to do up an old cottage,” I said. “But I’m self-employed.”
The smile broadened and he informed me a mortgage would be my best bet and I should follow him into a room and he would make an appointment for me with the branch mortgage advisor. He waived my quarterly fees as a good-will gesture and in the few minutes it took to complete that conversation my world was knocked ever so slightly off axis.
Instead of daydreaming about compost toilets and rain-water harvesting systems, I was catapulted into a dazzling show room of fancy brass taps and under-floor heating. A few days before the scheduled meeting with the mortgage advisor I phoned ahead to check what I needed to bring. Nothing she said, just bring yourself. I was perplexed then, to land in her office and be found lacking.
“Where are your plans? Your project list items? Your build schedule? You didn’t bring anything at all?” she said as I took a seat opposite.
“I called and asked what I should bring,” I said, feeling a faint rage rise in my chest.
She wanted to know what kind of renovation was required and how much I reckoned it would cost. I told her the cottage needed the full works; roof, windows, doors, plumbing, electrics, floors, insulation, everything. I did not tell her I had absolutely no idea how much it would cost.
“Right. Well let’s start with the plumbing. That’ll cost you at least ten thousand euro and that’s an absolute minimum.”
“No way,” I declared flatly. What in the hell would cost me ten thousand euro? What sort of fancy heat pump nano-technology had she in mind?
“Tell me yourself then, what had had you budgeted for plumbing?” she asked.
“Five thousand,” I declared with all the conviction of subterfuge.
I had no idea how much a back-boiler and a few radiators was going to cost. The mortgage advisor informed me that if I was to take on a mortgage of any amount from the bank, I would be spending €10,000 on the cottage plumbing. I would be using only bank approved contractors and construction companies for each and every stage of works. And before anything else, a solicitor would take my cottage and put it into the bank’s ownership as part of the process, a privilege for which I would pay.
The tension in the room had evolved through mutual dislike into a raw hostility. I’ve no doubt she saw me as an idealist, unaware of the scale of my own a naivety and hot-headed with it. In front of me I saw the red-haired embodiment of an institution that chased profits above all morality and left a trail of destruction still adrift to this day.
The truth is even if I badly wanted ten thousand euro to spend on plumbing, the deal on offer was a bad one. It left me with no control over who I could hire, when and what I could pay for the work and answerable at all times to the bank. And all this with a 4% per cent interest rate for a €50,000 loan.
I am thankful to the mortgage advisor for being so intolerable about my cottage. It made my brush with the bank delightedly brief. I figured this project was going to drive me to tantrums and treachery down the line but these were lessons I was opting to learn for myself. There was just no way was I going to have a mortgage convolute the process beyond all recognition. And fancy brass taps can be bought second-hand.
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** Listen to this bird in the garden to calm nerves after reading :)