Some people enjoy the thrill of a blind auction, but you probably wouldn’t be comfortable buying anything other than a record collection or some home furnishings.
For a young cross-Atlantic couple in their 20s, they found themselves the proud owners of a dilapidated, crumbling, rural Scottish home after their best-laid plans “gang agley.”
Believing he was bidding on a fixer-upper apartment in Glasgow, Cal Hunter doubled down, increasing a £10,000 bid to a £20,000 one after another fourth of the four flats was offered to him after the auction.
It turns out it wasn’t a flat in Glasgow, but a four-unit stone building called Jameswood Villa made on the shores of Holy Loch, in a small town called Dunoon in 1902.
However Hunter, who was in on the project with his Canadian girlfriend Claire Segeren, was undeterred despite his mistake.
“I was drawn to the idea of being mortgage-free in my 30s and having a beautiful place with a nice garden,” Hunter told the New York Times. “I knew it would be hard work, but we’d really been wanting an opportunity.”
Even though the pair were young enough to still be in university, they threw themselves into something that grew into a 5-year home renovation.
Documenting it all on their blog and Instagram, What Have We Dunoon, they did everything. At 26, Hunter was already an experienced carpenter and set to work cutting floorboards and laying new pipes for the plumbing as well.
He and Claire had help from experienced professionals with gas and electricity, but an almost unbelievable amount of the finished building was done by their hands, working five and a half days a week.
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Consulting books, YouTube, tradesmen, and of course other renovators and homesteaders who commented on their Instagram, they learned how to frame doors, put in glazing, flush radiators, insulate, work with stone, wood, and metal, roofing, and obviously so much more.
When they could, they relied on mostly free labor coming in from young people their age on Workaway, trading five hours of work per day in exchange for food and housing—an on-site tent camp and mobile home which the two lived in for over 5 years—Claire splitting time as waitress and Cal as a contractor to earn money for the necessary materials.
At times they bought materials new, such as their marble countertops, but much of the base structural fittings were cannibalized from the house and other abandoned houses like it in the area.
People became very interested in the effort. A 2019 article in the Dunoon Observer went viral, and masses of second-hand materials began coming their way. Their GoFundMe raised £30,000, or about $38,000, while their Instagram account amassed 300k subscribers.
In early July, the two no-longer-young people got a visit from the inspectors who officially cleared the house for habitation, and their five-year story finally came to a warm and cozy end.
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