You think you have life mapped out, at least in the short-term, with a place to live in a location of your choice, job and friends in the area, and then something drastic happens that changes absoultely everything.
BBC's popular daytime property programme Home's Under The Hammer usually features people looking to either 'flip' a renovation project property to make money as an adventure into property developing, or to add to their existing portfolio.
Some auction buyers appearing on the show have bid to buy a property to secure a home at a more reasonable price, and some are looking to move to a new area. Anne who was living in Abersoch, Gwynedd went to the auction because of her love for her son.
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Presenter Dion Dublin meets Anne and her brother Paul at the property in Chesterton, Staffordshire bought for £67,500 with all the usual Homes Under The Hammer buyer questions - why this location, why this property and what are you going to do with it? - and was expecting the standard answers, but Anne's story was far from standard.
She says: "The reason for (buying in) the Stoke area is because my son had a head injury, Conor, nearly four years ago. He was going to work one evening on his push bike, going down a hill in Wales, and we don't know really what exactly happened but he ended up hitting a stone wall with his head.
"And he was airlifted to Stoke, so I've more or less been here ever since, backwards and forwards. He's now at a rehabilitation home in Stoke, that's the reason I've come up here.
"My other daughter Hannah moved up here twelve months with me, working and travelling backwards and forwards. I now actually work for a head injury charity in Stoke, all brought about by my son's head injury."
Dion is stunned to hear of Anne's heart-wrenching reason for buying a property at auction in this location, and her brother Paul explains further.
He says: "Because of what happened to Conor and with Anne having to move from Abersoch down here to help him out, she's had to try and find a place down here and basically, she's got this place and we're going to go from there, and obviously try and make it a really nice place for her."
The three-bed house, once subject to a full renovation, is going to be Anne and her daughter's home so they can be permanently near Conor, with Paul who is a builder doing most of the work. John, Anne's other brother, is an electrician so it was obvious what jobs he would be allocated.
This six to eight month renovation was going to hopefully include a rear extension to become a spacious kitchen diner. Anne started off with a budget of around £13,000.
Paul says: "It's just material costs at the end of the day, obviously we're not going to charge Anne for doing it. It's a proper family affair, getting sorted, and getting Anne moving forward, it's a positive."
But just over a year later, in December when the programme returns at Christmas time, the house is not any bigger and the biggest change is just the decor and the festive decorations.
Anne explains: "The single-storey kitchen diner extension is on hold due to delays with drain work at the rear but we hope to get it started in the next few months. When it does happen, it will be the full width of the house, out to permitted permission boundaries.
"The house has had a full rewire, new central heating, the boiler was ok, just general decoration, nothing major, we were lucky really. We were going to have an open fire in the lounge but couldn't do that because of the way the chimney stack is, we would have had to have widened the access for the fire to stand in."
The door between the lounge and dining room was blocked off to stop people, and the dog, running around the house 'in circles', so Anne wanted the lounge to be separate to the kitchen diner to stop this temptation and create a cosy lounge too.
The delay wasn't only due to the drain problem, the family were now finding it harder to get supplies, and Paul was on other jobs that he would have to leave in order to work on Anne's house, so the timescale has gone out of the window.
But Anne also pushed it on even further as she didn't want the work, and all the mess it produces, done over the winter, so she is more than happy to start the project again in the spring once the structural engineer has sorted out plans for the drain issue.
As the rear extension has been paused, Anne had only spent £3,500 spent when the programme returned, with the estate agent valuing the home, once finished, at up to £90,000. But Anne is not at all interested.
She says: "I'm happy because I'm not moving, I do like it here, it's my home and it feels like my home. This is how I like my home, it feels comfortable and once the extension is done I know it will be complete and I'll be here forever. And then it should be a lovely home, and I can bring my son home then which is what I'm really hoping to do."
This story featured in Homes Under The Hammer, series 25, episode 15 which is currently available to view on BBC iPlayer. And never miss the best property, renovation and interiors stories – sign up for the Amazing Welsh Homes Property Newsletter here and sent to your inbox twice a week.
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