Now that's what I call a doer-upper.

On a dog walk in the beautiful village of Mells, near our house in Somerset, I came across this ruin on a patch of land that has no apparent access road.

Surrounded by fields of grazing cattle and swaying crops, as it must be in summer, this once beautiful house (complete with mullioned windows) has one of the most perfect views (seen here via an imperfect photographer).

Mells church and next to it the exquisite home of the Horner family (of Little Jack Horner fame, apparently).

The property comes with enough land to make a perfectly reasonable garden...but really your 'garden' would be the fields on all four sides.

And, of course, dog walks would be so much closer.....

Cut & Run or Wait & Hope? The pre-election question.

They say you make your own luck.

Well, if that is the case, then it's something I've never quite mastered.

I'm the ad man who won the life-changing, multi-million pound Fosters beer account one day...only to lose it the next because of some bizarre corporate politics.

I'm the creative guy who picked up the iconic boo.com business just a few weeks before the whole dotcom world (and boo) crashed spectacularly.

Even when I tried my hand at being a buying agent, I worked 12 months on a €25m deal only to lose it because the seller changed his mind on the day he was going to sign.

So what the hell did I expect when I got involved in doing-up property. That suddenly I'd know how to make my own luck.

No chance.

We managed to hit the market with our latest project just as Prime Central London hit the buffers.

It's still on the market after almost 4 months. Still getting positive viewings. But still not attracting an offer worth seriously considering.

It's the sort of situation (a bit like the Fosters beer fiasco) that makes you question everything.

Is the market really this bad? Are we asking way too much? Did I configure and style the house wrongly?

What makes it worse is that we could have sold this project for £2m over a year ago....without even doing it up. Why the hell didn't we?

And if we hadn't wasted time almost selling it as a wreck, we'd have been on the market months earlier when demand and prices were at their peak.

IF ONLY.....it could be the perfect epitaph to my life as a doer-upper.

We are where we are, however. And we have to make a difficult decision.

Do we to cut the price substantially and trust that this will flush out some quick buyers? Or hold our nerve through the upcoming election and hope that Cameron wins?

Some argue that an end to the uncertainty of a general election is enough to kick start a London market revival. Whoever wins. But with the bitter and twisted Scottish threatening to hold the country to ransom in the event of a hung parliament, the biggest worry is that nobody wins a majority.

Obviously I've asked our agents what they think.

They know how keen we are to sell, and I can't fault their efforts or their advice. The feedback from viewings has always been very detailed, very prompt and very honest. There's been some terrific PR. The team have been proactive and attentive.

But we both know that the house is, as they say, 'fully' priced.

We both believe, however, that the street and the house itself justify a slight premium. It's still £1m LESS than any other house or decent flat on the street (it is though somewhat smaller).

When it launched, I think we all believed that someone would walk in and fall in love with the property and its location...and just have to have it.

Whether it's the market, the price, the threat of a mansion tax or the way the house is configured, this simply hasn't happened.

So. Now what?

It's a gamble either way.

If we cut now, and things don't go to plan we may be forced to cut again after the election.

But if we wait until there's a new government, who knows what will happen.

Interestingly, the market feels less negative now than even a few weeks ago. Overseas buyers seem less obsessed with a mansion tax than UK buyers. And even the Euro collapse hasn't stopped the French, Italians, Greeks and Spanish looking to move.

London seems to be holding its appeal.

It's just that in a poor market buyers think they can demand and get massive discounts.

We have one persistent overseas buyer, for example, who is 'stuck' on a figure that's about £200k below our minimum.

Another buyer seemed to get excited too, until he realised we weren't going to give the house away.

One issue is that when buyers check the previous sold price for the property it looks as though we bought it for around £500k only a couple of years ago.

I wish we had. But this was just to buy the freehold. We also had to acquire a much more expensive leasehold...and then rebuild the house from its foundations to its roof.

All too often we've been cajoled or frightened into selling something below its real value. And so this time I think we'll hang on and see what happens.

Knowing my luck, of course, that's almost certainly the wrong decision and Alex Salmond will be running the country in a few weeks time.

Revisiting properties I've sold. BIG mistake.

The other day I drove along the Upper Richmond Road and noticed a For Sale board outside a house we lived in for 13 years.

It's a wonderful house in a less than wonderful location.

Back in the mid-1990s we were able to afford it because it is at the wrong end of Putney (east) and slap bang on the side of the south circular (or south standstill, as I call it).

Five bedrooms, three bathrooms, three or four reception rooms, large entrance hall, a wider than average garden and drive-in parking also made it ideal for our growing family.

Over the years, it became our first real 'doer-upper'.

We knocked down walls, splashed out on a Bulthaup kitchen, laid stone floors, installed a steam room, built a master bathroom bigger than most bedrooms and made it into a contemporary and hugely comfortable home.

People were surprised to pitch up at this naff end of Putney and find we'd built a modern, slightly minimalist home. (Most of our friends were still living in homes that looked much like the ones they'd grown up in.)

Anyway, we finally had enough of the almost non-existent District Line, the thundering trucks that shook the house and the hours wasted trying to cross over inadequate Thames bridges. And sold up.

Now it's for sale again, and I couldn't resist taking a look at what the current owners had done to our pride and joy.

BIG mistake.

A few parts of our kitchen may still be in place...but the rest has been turned into a temple to dodgy taste.

Perhaps most tellingly, the garden, once a restful haven, has been ripped out and replaced with a single, flat expanse of lawn. Like the interiors, it's bereft of imagination or humanity.

The bathrooms are beyond naff - ugly in their use of too many materials and self-consciously faddish.

Horrible cheap looking built-in cupboards have appeared in virtually every available alcove. And even the steam room has been violated with the installation of some sort of multi-coloured floor!

I was so upset looking at the agent's photos, I had to shut down Zoopla before I got too angry. I felt like going round to confront the owners.

But of course, this would be certifiable madness and pointless.

And I've been here before...

On a bay near St Tropez we did up a beachfront duplex with the help of a Notting Hill architect.

Cool cement finishes, white painted wood floors, grotesquely expensive minimalist bathroom fittings, open stairs, impractical white sofas...you get the picture.

Three months after it was finally ready to move into, we sold it and bought a little house a few doors down.

A year later I persuaded our agent (who also managed the property for its new owner) to take us into the flat again so that I could show the architect how it had finished up. I ignored the agent's pleas not to go, assuming of course that my masterpiece would have been preserved in its entirety by a grateful buyer. Another BIG mistake.

The white wood floors had been covered over with cheap shiny blue ceramic tiles. The hand-made cement topped kitchen had been ripped out and replaced with a basic Ikea setup. And the state-of-the-art brushed nickel bathroom fittings (all hardly used) had been chucked out in favour of GOLD (look) taps.

This time I almost threw-up. All over his disgusting blue tiles.

Why do these things matter so much? After all, even after spending far too much on the flat we still made money. And we'd moved to a much better property (far away from the obnoxious little Italian man who lived in the ground floor flat).

What does it matter that someone doesn't share my aesthetic, doesn't fall in love with the way we've done things, doesn't keep it just the way we'd keep it?

Arrogance? Maybe.

But I think it's more to do with the fact that any building project is so difficult, so exhausting and so emotionally draining that you want people to appreciate this, respect what you've done and keep it just the way it is.

Stupid, I know.

A tale of two neighbouring mansion flats, separated only by £800,000.

Either I just turned down one of the best opportunities of my short and not exactly glittering career as a 'doer-upper'. Or I narrowly missed a bit of a financial disaster.

The trouble is, I'll probably never know which of these is true.

It all started two weeks ago on a tour of potential new projects.

We'd turned up at one flat only to quickly realise that, although an interesting property, it offered no potential to turn a profit.

The disappointed agent soon worked out what we were searching for and said he had a 'doer-upper' just round the corner; an unmodernised mansion flat where the owner was prepared to do a deal.

It was in a 1930s block, so not pretty from the outside. But the common parts were smart, there were liveried porters manning the gates, private car parks and some effort at gardens.

Inside, the apartment was exactly what a 'mansion' flat should be.

A wide,very solid front door, a spacious hall, floor to ceiling windows, 4 bedrooms and 1700 sq ft of communally heated space.

All it needed was a fairly substantial makeover to turn it into a truly wonderful flat.

If it had been in Knightsbridge or Chelsea or Mayfair we'd have been looking at a £4m - £5m property. But we weren't.

We were in that no-man's land between Kensington High Street and Hammersmith. Sometimes called West Ken, or maybe Baron's Court, or even Kensington Olympia.

It's a peculiar, and often forgotten area, perhaps wrongly defined by the appalling nature of the North End Road - a strip of ugliness that reminds me of a desolate northern town where every shop is either boarded up or so down-at-heel you aren't sure if it's in fact still open.

Turn off the northern end of this road, however, and you immediately find yourself in relatively smart, wide streets of mansion flats. Some of which wouldn't look out of place in SW1.

It's important to have an immediate sense of the potential in any prospective property. I actually need to like it; not just see it as a financial transaction. And in this department the flat scored highly.

But this wasn't entirely my money I was thinking of investing. Indeed, it wasn't any of my money!

So the numbers had to work as powerfully as the emotional pull.

Again, on the face of it, these looked pretty good.

It transpired that the next door flat, which is identical in size and configuration, had been completely renovated and is now back on the market at a staggering £650,000 more than the apartment we were looking at. There couldn't be a more exact comparable.

By the time we'd negotiated the asking price down by £150k, this gap increased to a whopping £800,000.

At this point it looked as though we were sitting on an incredible opportunity. The seller had agreed our offer, the money to buy was largely in place, I'd even had my builders take a quick look and give me a ball-park makeover quote.

I went to bed that night relishing the thought of getting stuck in to a new project. But when I re-booted the laptop at 5am the next morning a nagging concern had taken the edge of any excitement.

I spent the next two hours checking and re-checking the sold and asking prices of all other flats in the area. Especially those in this particular block.

None of them had achieved (or even asked) anything like the per sq ft value being demanded for the neighbouring flat.

Even allowing for its superficially lavish refurb, there seemed no logic as to why one flat in the whole area was asking so much more than any other.

We'd already done this research once, before making an offer. But then we'd had a conversation with the agent for the 'expensive' flat and had been swayed by his well argued optimism. He even seemed to have a buyer about to make a very decent offer.

But the more I looked at the situation, the more implausible the price gap seemed to get.

Either this whole area was due a revaluation upwards, or this particular agent was trying it on.

The truth is probably a blur of both of these.

Given its relatively central and very convenient location, this area is definitely undervalued. (If this part of North End Road had a Waitrose, prices would be up before you could say "decaf extra hot skinny latte.")

Most properties are marketed by one smallish local agent who plays safe in terms of valuations, whereas the agent marketing the more expensive flat is a 'global' high-end network used to selling to less price conscious international buyers.

One is probably marginally undervaluing the area, the other is slightly hyping it.

So, where did that leave me?

Well, somewhere rather less comfortable slap bang in the middle.

If we couldn't get near the higher valuation, then the new higher SDLT rates, financing costs, refurb, legals and sales agent costs would mean the whole exercise was riskier and much, much tighter.

In which case, I'm out. (As any self-respecting Dragon would say.)

Hong Kong: Where property prices are as high as the buildings.

We are on our annual trip to Hong Kong, visiting family.

It's a good opportunity to look at the market in London from a somewhat more global perspective; far removed from the daily anxiety of trying to buy and (more importantly) sell in Prime London.

Although HK is beset with political uncertainty as it finally comes to terms with the reality of being a Chinese 'colony' rather than a British one, its frenetic energy is as compelling as ever.

Young Europeans still pour into the city, excited to find themselves in a town where (thanks to low taxes) they can afford to live the high life. But these days it's often Mainland Chinese who are really running the show, pack the luxury shopping malls and who will define the future.

The property market here may not be as hot as it once was, but new high-rise apartment buildings continue to spew onto the market and investors are still eagerly snapping up the best of them.

Applications to buy at some developments are now so oversubscribed that properties are allocated by lottery.

For part of our trip, we are staying in one of the city's hottest property spots - Kennedy Town. This area at the western edge of Hong Kong is gradually being 'gentrified'.

The Cadogan, The Hudson and The Merton are new high-rise developments rising 30 floors or more above crumbling, older, poorer low-rise apartment buildings. What were once open fronted street level repair workshops or local laundries are being transformed into trendy bars and chic restaurants. Young expat bankers and lawyers carrying take-out lattes from Pacific Coffee are almost as prevalent as Chinese families heading out for some breakfast noodles.

Much of this transformation is due to the arrival of a major new MTR station in Kennedy Town (HK's underground), which can whisk you to Central or Admiralty in less than 10 minutes.

It's hard to think of a direct comparison in London, but I suppose parts of East London, Elephant & Castle or Vauxhall come closest.

What isn't remotely comparable however is the cost. An apartment at the latest and smartest Kennedy Town tower (the Cadogan) can cost £2000 per square foot or more. That's Knightsbridge prices to live in the equivalent of Elephant & Castle!

Given the ongoing uncertainties surrounding HK's relationship with China and the pent-up frustrations of the Occupy movement, I find this all rather confusing and at the same time encouraging.

Aside from the very real threat of some insane Islamist atrocity, London feels like a world city, a grown up if you like, whereas HK still feels some way off that by comparison. Where we have elegant terraces and squares they have showy tall towers and glitzy malls. Where we have the rule of law, democracy and a mature sense of fairness they are struggling to find an identity after passing from one colonial master to another.

Day to day life in London is also no longer massively more expensive than places like Hong Kong. OK, so taxes are lower out here (as are taxi fares). But when you look at the basic costs of housing, health, education and the often imported foods, things begin to even up.

Over here it costs £30,000 just to get your child's name down for a decent school where English is taught. And you won't get that back until your child leaves school. Fees on top will be another £30k a year. And that's not even a boarding school.

If you want good healthcare on tap....you'll have to pay for it. Big time.

And, as I've explained, even a relatively cramped one bed flat in an older Kennedy Town block can cost around £600k to buy. Or about £3000 a month to rent.

Don't get me wrong, I love HK and think it's a wonderful place for young Europeans to adjust their perceptions of the world and become less west-centric.

But, square foot for square foot, London still looks far better value from a property perspective than Hong Kong.

For that £2000 a square foot in K-Town's teeming streets, you could have bought our small (but perfectly formed) flat in Knightsbridge.

Zuma would be a stroll away, rather than the 20 minute cab ride we took to their HK outpost the other night. Harrods would be your 'corner shop' rather than the rash of 7/11s that have taken over K-Town. And your neighbour would be an Arab princess rather than a slightly resentful Chinese local.

Over on the other side of HK, in the top end middle class environs of Jardine's Outlook or Happy Valley,  the price of a 1100 square foot box with a pinched, vertiginous terrace on the 25th floor of a high rise would easily buy our 1350 square foot house in Kensington's Abingdon Road with a front garden, two terraces and two large living areas.

Currently being marketed in Happy Valley, for example, is a new block called Broadwood Twelve. Prices for the higher floors are around $HK33,000 (£2800) per square foot and the building rises to a staggering 51 floors. If I could face the stomach churning fear of living that high, the views out across the city and harbour must be truly extraordinary.

But in the time it takes a Broadwood Twelve resident just to descend to ground level, I can be on Kensington High Street or wandering into Holland Park.

To my mind, there's no comparison. And I really am trying not to be biased.

On top of this, the house in Abingdon Road is around £600 a square foot cheaper!

With both newly fashionable and older more established top end areas now more expensive in HK (and to my mind less livable) than London, it's perhaps not surprising that a major international agent with a big presence here has just predicted that a new wave of money will head west this year to buy up chunks of London.

Lets hope so.

Of course, it's not entirely fair to compare lifestyles, or indeed properties and prices. They are completely different. And there's much to be said for the way of life in both cities.

However (and Mr Farage, please note), personally I'd far rather an overbearing and expensive EU bureaucracy on my back than the overwhelming might of a Beijing government that's still communist in name (and frighteningly authoritarian in practice).

Not too shabby. Even though I say so myself.

Its been 10 months in the making - thanks to planning delays and several shockingly inept professional consultants - but it's now done, dusted...and on the market.

As you can see below, following the beauty parade of five agents, we went with Savills. For a large operation at the top end, these guys (actually it's girls in this case) have been a revelation. 

Given the state of the market (thanks, George, for making it even worse), I have no idea when/if we'll sell the house. But if it doesn't go quickly (or even slowly) I won't be blaming our agent, Sarah. 

She worked incredibly fast to get it on the market in time for a short burst before the Christmas shutdown and it's already paid off. Even though we haven't had 'mass' viewings, those we're having seem like serious buyers. And the proportion of second viewings is high. I couldn't really have asked for much more in the circumstances.

Now that we've moved in, we really do love this house. And in truth we'd do almost anything to keep it. Indeed, I've become a major buyer of lottery tickets in the forlorn hope that my luck might change.

Combined with our house in Somerset, 38 Abingdon Road makes the ideal London base for our life stage. Small enough to be easy to maintain, large enough to be far more than a claustrophobic pied a terre.

I'm no interior designer (obviously) but we've tried to make it a very livable, relaxed space rather than a pristine, self-conscious showhouse.

My wife's paintings add a bit of quality and personality (in fact, I'm worried that they are attracting more interest from some viewers than the house itself).

I'll be sorry to leave this home. But will be relieved if we can sell it soon.

As always, we have gone over budget and come to market late. For a year now the balance on my bank account has only gone in one direction....and it would be nice (not so say vital) to see it go in the opposite direction for a change.

But in the meantime, I'm going to revel in the chance to live in two of the nicest places in Britain - London W8 and Chantry, nr Frome.

(Anyone want to buy a pair of wonderful houses?)

We are an island nation: A kitchen island nation.

A few weeks ago, as I specified the finishing touches to our latest project, I was struck by just how much Britain has changed. And not always for the better.

A few generations ago, bravery was going off to fight in a World War.

Today it's choosing not to have a kitchen island with something called a 'breakfast bar'.

It seems we've become a bunch of limp-wristed interior obsessives, agonising over the endless variety of greys on the Little Greene and Farrow & Ball colour charts. Having sleepless nights about whether to plump for 3 seater sofas or a possibly more 'on trend' corner unit. Worrying whether or not the wood floor planks we've chosen are as wide as today's fashion dictates.

I'm as guilty of this as anyone, but it doesn't make me feel any better about myself.

I can't imagine my grandfather (or father, for that matter) caring one iota what the kitchen looked like, or what colour the walls were, or whether the bathroom was a wet room or not (assuming, that is, they actually had a bathroom).

Their lives were more about survival; about putting 'bread on the table', about whether they could afford to buy us new school shoes, about keeping a roof over our heads rather than what was under that roof.

I suppose recent events to commemorate WW1 have brought this all into sharp focus.

The nearest I've come to a dank, dark, muddy trench is the dig-out for our new basement. And that sort of says it all.

I have been spoilt. My children even more so. Aren't we lucky.