Woman who bought £1 house in Italy shares how much it really costs to live there

You might have heard of certain parts of the world where you can buy a house for just £1, which sounds like an absolute bargain.

Most of the time buying a house is really f**king expensive and in many places prices are rising at a higher rate than wage growth, meaning that your ability to afford a place can't catch up to how expensive it is.

There are a few solutions around this including taking on a gargantuan amount of debt, buying with someone else and splitting the gargantuan amount of debt into two large amounts of debt, or buying a shared ownership where you only get half the house along with a moderate amount of debt and have to pay rent on the other half.

If none of those options sounds particularly appealing then you might consider moving to Italy and buying a house for less than the price of a cup of coffee, a bit like Meredith Tabbone who bought a home in Sambuca di Sicilia for just one Euro, which depending on exchange rates is basically one pound.

Her £1 house actually cost a lot more to buy, and much more to renovate (YouTube/CNBC Make It)

The reason why some of these houses are so cheap is because there are some towns and villages in Italy where people have moved out and nobody's moved in.

These places, often in beautiful locations, don't have a lot of work for younger generations so they move to cities and the towns are left with crumbling, older properties until there might be pretty much nobody left.

Buying one of these incredibly cheap houses comes with a catch, you'll be expected to spend your own money doing it up and you're on the clock to get it all done.

Speaking to CNBC, US woman Meredith explained that she could trace her family history back to Sambuca di Sicilia and decided the offer was too good to pass up.

The house needed a lot of work but now it's a modern holiday home with its own sauna (YouTube/CNBC Make It)

While people can spend thousands just to get these homes in a decent condition, the 45-year-old spent a total of $475,000 (£383,000) on turning it into a real holiday home complete with four bedrooms, a modern kitchen, dining room, library, living room and a sauna. What a few years ago was an old house in a dwindling town is now a modern home that at least has people living in it for part of the year.

If you're thinking of buying one of these £1 houses then it's going to cost you much more than that, Meredith spent about €5,900 (£4,890) to actually acquire the place as there's all sorts of fees and auctions of the properties can drive up the bids.

When she first got there the place was 'dire at best' with no electricity or running water, a roof containing the very dangerous material asbestos and 'probably two feet of pigeon poop on the floor'.

Charming.

She had originally planned to spend about €40,000 (£33,000) on renovations but later also bought the house next door and widened the scope of the project, meaning costs shot up.

Another couple who undertook a similar project said they had 'no regrets' about putting it all together, though they were surprised at first by how much they'd have to spend.