Welcome

Hi

My wife, Chris, and I are in the process of buying and restoring a 19th century farmhouse at Monte San Martino on the edge of the Monti Sibillini National Park in Macerata province, Le Marche, Italy. See this article from the Independent's travel section for a good introduction to the Marche and Monte San Martino in particular.

There are, I am sure, many pitfalls and scary moments in any project like this - especially if you are over 1000km away from the action most of the time and I thought it would be interesting to record what happens and our feelings about it. Maybe if you are thinking of doing something similar there will be the odd thing that you will find useful but, to be honest, the main purpose is for me to enjoy writing and to have a record of what went on.

The beginning - Easter 2007
It all began with a family holiday in Italy at Easter last year. We had never visited the Marche region before but those nice people at Ryanair (about which / whom there may be more comments passim) were virtually giving away flights from Liverpool to Ancona. We found a lovely B&B, Casa Montalto, at Montalto delle Marche in the south of the region, run by an Anglo-German couple, Debbie and Thomas Manz and arrived on a sunny day with Dominic (who's now 9) and Kitty (7). We found ourselves absolutely charmed by the area and the people and, on returning home, began to think about buying a property ourselves.

We have often thought about getting into the buy to let market and have gone so far as looking at places to do up but somehow the idea of a terrace on Macclesfield or Stockport (our nearest towns in England) just never seemed that exciting. Nor had we ever really wanted to buy a holiday home. I have business in Spain and we can go there any time if we want a place of our own to stay but the idea of going back to the same place again and again wasn't really us. Nor could we afford to buy the sort of place we would like and the sort of place we perhaps could afford (a small holiday apartment in a resort) didn't especially appeal.

However, the more we thought about finding somewhere in the Marche, the more the pieces started to come together. The area is, to our eyes, as beautiful as its better known neighbour Umbria, with the added bonus of having a coastline as well as mountains. Prices of properties to do up are still low (compared to Tuscany and Umbria) and there is a ready supply of them. there is a growing profile for the area among visitors (especially from the UK) which means that good rental income should be available to cover the costs of financing our project and the value of the finished property should be more than the cost of buying and restoring it (as it should be to compensate for the work you put in and the risk you are inevitably taking.) So we could end up with somewhere that would give us a reasonable income and that would be available for us to use out of season (November to April). A decision that suited both the heart and the head.

I'll be posting the next part of the story shortly ....