When Martin Roberts - property expert and presenter of BBC's popular daytime property show Homes Under The Hammer - visited a three-bed end of terrace on a hillside in Maesteg he was impressed by the guide price of £34,000 but maybe not so much with the absence of a kitchen.
He suggested that this empty space where a kitchen should be would make it a challenge for most people to raise a mortgage to buy the house. But Martin was captivated by the view across the valley from the front of the property plus possibly from the rear garden too, although it was impossible to tell as the garden swept up the hillside and was totally overgrown.
The house went to auction and was bought by Mike from Southampton, a retired construction project manager, for £45,500 who was planning on staying in the area and renovating the house as a new home for himself and dog Toby.
Mike said: "I've always enjoyed coming up here, the south coast, the beaches, the mountains, rivers, waterfalls, you know - everything really - it's so lovely up this way."
Mike planned on doing most of the work himself, apart from the having the electrics and gas central heating checked by a qualified company, so his budget was a very modest £5k - £6k and a timescale of around six months.
But the programme didn't return for another four years and in that time Mike had been busy, but only in patches, with six months slowly turning into year after year, and when the programme returned to film in April 2023, the rear garden still hadn't been tackled.
In that time though Mike and the tradespeople that he had employed had completely renovated the house including damp prevention work to the floor and having the lower parts of the walls sealed and then new flooring laid. The outside of the walls were also chemically injected as part of this important work.
There was, at last, a kitchen to be found and the downstairs was redecorated throughout. Upstairs the floors and some of the joists had been replaced and the bathroom wall was moved so the main bedroom could be made bigger.
The redecorating continued upstairs and included new carpets and a new bathroom suite, plus new skirting and internal doors that gave the house the feel of a new build rather than a former miner's cottage dating back decades.
Mike said: "The biggest challenge was getting hold of tradesmen, I tried to keep everyone local which I did in the end and then we had problems getting hold of building materials as well, and then prices just went silly.
"The garden at the moment is relatively untouched since I bought the house. I'm not intending to do a great deal with it, I'll leave that to someone else's creative genius."
So Mike was now planning to sell the house rather than live in it and he revealed why - and also why he took so long to get the property to this stage of its renovation - he got married to the surprise of his family.
He said: "It's probably still six months of work but with big gaps due to various things - cash flow, going on holiday, getting married, getting a dog - time just flies by."
Yes, Mike and his now bride Hayley ran off to Gretna Green in Scotland to get married and then embark on a big tour of Scotland in a campervan.
Mike explained: "The rest of the family were a little upset not to get invited to the wedding, but my daughter was fine with that because she knows what I'm like - a bit impetuous. We just got on and did it, basically. But everyone's forgiven us since... I think!"
As well as getting the timescale estimate nowhere near the reality, Mike was way off with the budget prediction too.
Mike said: "As far as I'm aware I'm up to about spending £21k on it, it just crept up and up and, you know, an extra tin of paint here, flooring there, and the prices just went through the roof on everything. If I'd have just bought it all initially I'd be happy, but I didn't. I bought it as I needed it and that turned out to be a mistake."
The total spend at the property was £66,500 and the estate agent suggested a resale value of between £70k - £80k, meaning Mike could pocket a pre-tax profit of between £3.5k and £13.5k. Even though the estimated rental yield was predicted as around 10%, Mike was keen to sell.
He said: "I was thinking I'd rent it to a local family, something along those lines, but the way it is - I want to spend the money now!" And maybe Mike will spend it on a wedding anniversary holiday with wife Hayley.
This episode was part of series 26, episode 33 of Homes Under The Hammer currently available to view on BBC iPlayer.
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