House Hunting - June 2007 (Day 2)

On Tuesday morning we set off for Monte San Martino but had a 20 minute delay while I parked up to take a call from company BB. I basically said that unless they told me what I was going to see, I would cancel the visit as I did not have time to waste going to places that did not meet our needs and they promised to ensure we were not disappointed and that their representative (who was now Gabriele instead of Pier) would call us to make the arrangements.

We met Lokation at the Monte San Martino turnoff on the Amandola to Fermo road and followed the car almost up into the town before going back down again before arriving at what you would think of as a typical Italian farmhouse: square, three storeys, mainly built of honey-coloured stone.

It was what is generally described as "habitable" which does not, as you might think, mean you can move right in. My interpretation is that it is basically structurally sound (and still has a roof on for example) but has little if any facilities. It did however have a colony of bats which rather freaked Chris out.

The house itself was lovely. At the time we noted: "lovely stone, bricks. honey coloured. v. attractive". Its location was unusual because the river Tenna ran (or, in June, trickled) just below it. Typically, houses are perched on a hillside but here we were set relatively low down but looking up to three hill towns and with glimpses of the Sibillini mountains in the distance. All around the house were nut and fruit trees and the land beyond was all planted with fruit trees - mainly cherries, I think. Although we really liked it, it was 50% bigger than we wanted and the price was well over the budget too. Nevertheless, we thought, if this is the first one, what are the rest going to be like? Having been worried that we wouldn't find anything, we were now really optimistic.

To be honest the rest of the morning was rather disappointing. There were some spectacular locations but there was always something not quite right: poor access, unattractive house or simply that they were ruins. We were definite now that ruins weren't for us.

And so on to company BB. It's one of the best known (or at least most advertised) in the region but what a waste of time! They had completely ignored what we said and because the guy knew the area around Montalto that was basically all they showed us. When we said that we'd told the office that we were more interested in something nearer the mountains he just shrugged and said it was too far to go and anyway he didn't deal with that area. He also had two colleagues with him taking photos of the properties and seemed more interested in this than in showing us the collection of ruins he had for us. He also peddled us various bits of misinformation about legal requirements. All in all a complete waste of time. I would definitely never deal with this lot again.

It was quite clear that the one we had both fallen for was the one in Monte San Martino. Trouble was that, like I said, it was both much bigger than we were looking for and well above our budget too.