The first house hunting trip

Thanks for continuing to read my blog.

Gorgeous blue sky with E's tree

I am trying to go back over the last 18 months and distill out the steps (both clever and stupid) which have led me to the place I find myself in now; proud owner of a property in Southern Bulgaria and on the countdown to the day I pack my life up here and become another of the thousands of people who are leaving these shores.

I left you at the end of the last post as I got back from the first visit to Bulgaria and what a success it had been. We had felt welcome everywhere we went, even being stopped as we walked through the town by someone who recognised us from the cafe the night before and wanted to greet us again.

Now, for the long hard part of the process; finding somewhere to buy.

There are many websites online which sell houses in Bulgaria; all you need to do is go onto any search engine and type the words in. In addition to this you can go via eBay where there are continually excellent opportunities. What I found was, however, that on eBay the houses for sale are (understandably) normally clumped together in "ex pat" communities which I did not want to live near, and were also mainly towards the north of the country.

Following some activity on search engines I identified a couple of websites which had several houses in the rough region that attracted me and I contacted these to arrange for a viewing. These were Bulgarian Properties and Bulgarian House and both were attentive and agreed to arrange viewings of a list of houses which I identified from their websites.

The trip was booked in August and it allowed for me to experience the heat which is common in the Bulgarian summers.

For this trip I stayed at my friend's house which ended up being an excellent choice as the first full day, which I had put aside to spend time with the representative from Bulgarian House, ended up being free as I could not contact her at all and she did not show up at the arranged meeting point. Another lesson learned; nothing in Bulgaria ever really happens perfectly to plan, no matter how well you plan things.

Not to be discouraged, myself and E headed off in my hire car and explored the region without another guide; we decided to use the location of a group of houses for sale (which Bulgarian Properties were maybe going to show me the day after) as our target and when we got up there found what appeared to be the perfect property; it was set in the middle a large amount of land, it needed knocking down but the floor plan was big enough that a new Skitza would not have been necessary as I could have built on the footings, and the location was perfect; the only sound when you stood in the back yard was that of the wind in the deciduous woodland surrounding it.

The Rhodopean ideal (or at least mine)

Unfortunately it was not marked for sale; just another of the plenteous empty properties which are scattered all over the Rhodope.

The next day had always been planned as a rest day and I enjoyed every second of it, especially as the thermometer reached 45 degrees while I sat in the sun with my Kindle, a hat on and a large bottle of the local beer to keep me hydrated.

Slightly warm.....

Lovely cooling beer (plus a fly hoping to get lucky)

There was more luck the next day with George, the excellent local representative of Bulgarian Properties, actually ringing me as I was about 10 minutes late to our meet up point and this good impression continued through the day; George had a clear idea of where he wanted to take me and had taken account of the sheets which I had printed out with houses on them. We visited an old primary school up above the lake (too exposed, house pointing the wrong way, needed completely knocking down and the price did not take this into account), an empty house on top of a mountain (very difficult road to get up, one neighbour but they were very close, beautiful views, very cheap indeed) and then a village in which every house was for sale (no road at all to the village - had to walk for ten mins to get to it, houses all needed a lot of work, would have had to buy the whole village) and finally to a house which we had some background information on as it had been offered to another friend previously and the paperwork was not in order.

The primary school

The house on the mountain (plus George)

A couple of the village houses, and George on the "road"

The house with no paperwork

From the whole day there was not a single house which came close to the perfect one we had discovered on our own the day before and, when we asked George about it, he said he would do his best to find the owners. I also went home determined to track them down and give Sherlock Holmes a run for his money.

An important point to note, and one which cannot bear being repeated too many times to ANYONE who is looking at purchasing a property abroad in any country is: make sure the paperwork is in order before giving any money to anyone. In  Bulgaria there are two items of paperwork which are vital and without which you should not even start buying a house; the Skitza and the Noterelien. The Skitza is a plan of the property defining where the land you own ends and also the footprint of the building. The Notorelien (my spelling is almost certainly wrong here) is a description of the contract for ownership of the house, like the deeds in the UK.

I asked George about these for all the house which he showed me and he was not able to produce them on request; this is a big red flag and my advice would be; if someone cannot show you those documents, walk away.

Summer sunset over the Greek Mountains

The first visit

So, where did I leave you?

Oh yes, we were just planning our first visit to Bulgaria.

I think it is important, while I am writing this blog, to detail things I have learned which may help if you are planning on doing something similar; not just things which I have managed (by luck) to get right, but bring out the mistakes which I have made as well.

The first and most important thing which we did right was, before making any firm plans or buying any of the oh-so-temptingly cheap properties on eBay, we went to visit the country. This may seem obvious but I have read so many posts where people have been tempted by what appears to be a bargain, only to get to the country and realise that they really don't like it.

The second is to really think about what you want. Don't just jump; make plans because if you have a reason for doing something, when it gets difficult (which it will) you can look at your carefully thought out reasons and it will help you to drive through them. The first decision we had to make was; what kind of location were we looking for. After a lot of discussion we came up with the following rules that were cast iron; if a location did not have these characteristics then we would discard it:

1. There had to be a shop within relatively easy walk of the house (30 mins or so)
2. There had to be a main town with an hour drive of the house
3. We had to be within 1.5 hours drive of the coast

Obviously the first two points were not relevant until we had found a more general location but the last point was vital; it enabled us to ignore the majority of Bulgaria and focus in on the locations which would work for us. Other considerations were then applied; we did not want to move to an "expat community" was probably the next most important, and my love for mountains and gorgeous views meant that the Rhodope became the top priority.

Our visit was made much easier and more pleasant because of a contact we had made in the area we were looking to move and this kind and generous lady went so far as to recommend, and book us into, a couple of convenient hotels for our visit. This took a lot of the stress away as it is easy to pick something which looks nice on the internet, but is actually no where near where you should be; another useful point here - develop local contacts.

We flew out in February, the earliest we thought the weather would support a visit, but not so late that we would not get to experience some of the harshness of winter and the reality of a snow-bound mountainous region. This was the first time I had driven on the "wrong" side of the road for any extended period of time and it was a baptism of fire; we drove into some of the worst fog I have ever experienced; you could not even see the sides of the road, and by the time I drove out of that I had developed a level of confidence with being on the right hand side of the road which I probably would not have had otherwise.

Ice in the carpark when we picked up our hire car

The first visit we decided clearly would just be an exploration; we wanted to feel how comfortable we felt there, whether the people were friendly, the towns had the facilities we felt were important. It was important, we felt, before even thinking about looking for a house, to decide if we WANTED to go to this strange new place.

We spent our time driving around the villages in the region, walking into shops and cafes (we had spent a little bit of time learning a few words so we could get by as almost no one speaks English in the non-tourist parts of Bulgaria) and just trying to get a feel for the atmosphere. We built a snowman in an isolated field, ate bread and cheese several times sat on a ridge with only the sound of cow bells to disturb us, ate cheesy chips and Shopska salad in a cafe with our friend and shivered at night with the heating on fall blast as the temperature plummeted.

The snow man stands proud....

Only the sound of cow bells to disturb the peace

Shopska Salad

Our meal partially destroyed in the cafe

Shivering in the hotel room by the heater

The drive back presented a different meteorological challenge to the fog of the inbound journey; as we drove over the mountain pass to get back to the main motorway it started snowing and it got heavier and heavier; I drove at about 15 miles an hour max all the way over, going sideways round corners and sliding whenever another car came up towards me. It was a useful reminder that while we had been relatively lucky with the weather (it had been t shirts warm every day) the winters in Bulgaria are rather more severe than UK ones and the chances of being cut off were very high, even in not very remote parts of the country.

The mountain pass as I skidded down it

As we returned it was clear that this was where we wanted to go, and a plan was made to come back and view houses in the area, with the aim of escaping the UK hopefully within a year or so.

Now we just had to find a house.... just.....

Why Bulgaria, and why now?

Thank you all for the positive reaction to my starting this blog. I hope you all find it useful and interesting.


As I said in my first post I need to catch up to where I am at now, and fast, so I can start to record things in near to real time. To this end I am going right back to the beginning....

Why did I chose Bulgaria and why do I even WANT to emigrate?

It all started a couple of years ago when I was living in a lovely house with a large garden and I decided I wanted to grow food. This may seem like a simple thing to decide but for me, who had not really ever done much in the way of real gardening before, it seemed like a big thing for me. I'm not going to go into that (and you can read all about it by going to my other, ongoing, blog The Part Time Homesteader) but it was down to my researches into homesteading that Bulgaria entered the picture.

I read many blogs about growing your own, and trying to become self sufficient from having zero previous experiences and one of the blogs which I came to read as regularly as the author updated was The Gud Life blog, written by a man who had bought a place in Bulgaria and was teaching himself from scratch ways to support himself.

Over time, and with the growing going well, it became more and more apparent to me that I wanted to get out of England and go somewhere closer to growing living things and the thought of what Dom was doing kept coming back to me. Through another acquaintance I met other people who were over there having escaped our daily grind and in particularly one lady was exceptionally welcoming.

I spent some time searching on eBay (yes, eBay) for houses and the prices were amazing; I regularly saw large houses with 2-3000 square metres of land sell for around £3000; houses which looked like they needed some freshening up but were by no means falling down wrecks. A couple of emails to previous customers of Investment Link gave me a small measure of confidence with the company; of those who replied, none complained of fraud and the only negative was one chap saying that the house with an "internal" toilet had turned out to have the loo in the garage.

With all these thoughts running through my head the decision was made to go and visit and see how welcoming, how comfortable and how much like home Bulgaria would be.

This trip was booked to take place in February 2012; our first visit to Bulgaria.

So, what is this blog all about then...

Welcome to my blog.

It strikes me as I sit here typing this introduction that I have probably started this blog a little bit late; maybe by a year or so. The reason I think that is because I am going to write about my experiences whilst emigrating to Bulgaria and I started this process in February 2012.

I suppose that is one of the problems with a decision like this; it starts as a "wouldn't it be nice" and it isn't until the "oh shit it is actually happening" moment that the thought to record your experiences hits.

What I am going to do is this. I am going to write some blog posts about how I have got to where I am today (dream property purchased, tentative date for the drive over set) to catch you all up with the steps I have been through to achieve this, interspersed with which (dependent on how long this all takes) will be updates of current activities.

Clear?

As mud?

Good good, mud is good for you.

 So, to whet your appetite, below find a selection of pictures of Bulgaria to help you understand why I am moving there.

Cheers for reading