Saturday 10 October 2009

Life here versus UK

Things are rather different here in Bulgaria, not that I'm surprised by that fact. We didn't move here to have the same lifestyle that we had in the UK. I'm not putting the UK down though, it does have a lot of plus points, but in our case Bulgaria has more to offer.....so far!

We ended up buying a house that hadn't been lived in for quite a few years. With the house also came 2,400SQM's of garden. But being as part of our dream was to buy a property with land we ended up buying the 9 plots adjacent to us too! The whole place came as a job lot and when totalled up we have close to 20,000SQM's, 1 house, 1 bungalow and a variety of half demolished properties and barns.

Both the main house and the bungalow needed a fair bit of work and we've already made good progress with both of these. Most of the land has to date been left unworked, in hindsight we did take on rather more than we could handle but as time goes on we will do something with more of the land. The main house garden we have used for the last 2 years to grow vegetables, the rest we've allowed the animals to graze.

It's worth mentioning that the whole buying process in Bulgaria isn't easy. Firstly there's the language difference, secondly the Bulgarians are sticklers for paperwork and everything needs to be signed, notarised, translated etc. Finding a good estate agent can also be hard, there are no laws to govern who can be an estate agent and properties can be sold by multiple agencies at the same time.

I'd suggest that anyone thinking of buying property in Bulgaria takes the time to do some homework and have a look at the forums for expats which give a lot of helpful advice.

www.britsinbulgaria.co.uk and www.mybulgaria.info both have a lot of useful posts.

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