Bought 2002, £127,500.
This was one-third of a grade II listed hall house. The hall house had been converted into three cottages in the 60s, two of these had been restored back into a good size house in the 80s. But that left this 900 square footer at the end with a long 100ft garden. Luckily there was also a half of a very good size out-building, one wall of which was flint (though this had been allowed to get covered with ivy). The garden expanded into a larger rectangle behind that building, leaving room for a vegetable patch, flower beds and bedding around the edges.
When I first found this house, it had been rented out and lying empty on the market for six months. It did not look good inside, with some damp showing through lime plaster, an ugly tiny kitchen and the smallest bathroom in the world. The only bedroom was in the attic, probably done without following building regs considering only a ladder led to it. But it was a lovely bedroom, with a dormer window looking out onto the gardens. The first floor was a double aspect (front and back) living room with some original wood flooring and some not. I fell in love!
I paid a little under the asking price, but somehow the sellers had come up with another offer counteracting my first! Very suspicious after six months of disinterest. I got a survey and it didn’t tell me anything I didn’t already know but did confirm that there were some big expenditures to come in the future.
The work began. The first job was to build a fence between the two parts of the garden. I had two Great Danes arriving to stay for a couple of months. Long story short, this is when I met Rick. He quoted for the fence, put it up and then quoted on a french drain to protect the flint wall and an attached soakaway. He ended up repairing another small external flint wall, redoing the small patio outside the kitchen and working with me to create a beautiful patio from six-inch quarry tiles our neighbours were pulling up and throwing away. Almost all the work we carried out in the garden was from other people’s waste, from rose bushes to railway sleepers to fence panels and a beautiful bunch of forget-me-nots.
The next thing to do was to try to understand what it meant to work on a grade II listed house. I invited the conservation officer out to discuss what I wanted to do, especially with the outbuilding which I needed to make into an office. The meeting was helpful, basically, she said that it was in such bad shape that I could do anything I wanted inside because I could only improve it but I just needed to keep the exterior looking the same. For the office that meant getting some builders, I knew from Lancashire to make a replacement frontage in their workshop and bring it down to install. They also lined the room with plasterboard and I tiled it. Much later on, I worked with my hall house neighbours to replace the roof, we were able to get away with undertaking it as a repair rather than a replacement which would have required we pay for recycled tiles because we reused the tiles from the top part on the bottom part and only used new ones on the top. A couple of eyebrows were raised but the tiles soon weathered in.
The kitchen cupboards were rejuvenated with yellow paint! Tiles and laminate were replaced with some gorgeous Mexican green and yellow handcrafted tiles. Before putting the house back on the market I worked with an architect to provide plans and planning permission for a kitchen extension. The kitchen was tiny but I still managed to cook several Christmas dinners in it. The bedroom was next, which was simply painted in white, with all the cupboards and fitted drawers painted in off-white. I covered the drawers in hessian. It was carpeted also in off-white.
Next was the first-floor living room. I had wanted to strip the whole floor back to the original floorboards on the first floor but it turned out that it was one-third original which I revealed covering the rest with carpet. Forcing the carpet installers to create a moon shape at one end, hey, it worked. The timber structure was, of course, left as is and I carefully painted between them. The funny chimney wall was painted a highlight Norfolk green. A couple of years later I hired a local joinery firm to redo the stairs from the living room into the kitchen. These were made in oak and were absolutely beautiful.
Finally, I got to do the ground floor dining room/library. I disguised some horrible brickwork with painted cladding, choosing some rather lovely Laura Ashley paint (the whole house was painted matt, not a shiny bit of gloss anywhere). I tiled the floor with large square slate tiles (a look that was to reoccur in our US new build), my friend David came up to help with the floor and by now I was on a deadline – I needed to get this room finished by Christmas. My dad and I worked together to build the shelving for all the books and at last, the house was done!
I lived with the old bathroom for a while, but then the boiler needed replacing and it made sense to also change the bathroom was completely stripped back and the toilet moved, which also gave us the opportunity to rebuild the soil disposal outside with a better slope. We took the ceiling up to the roof slant leaving an internal gable end. It was tiled in mosaic and furnished with a claw foot bathtub, overhead shower, glass vanity bowl and heated towel rail. Tiny but gorgeous!
Rick installed the DVD/CD shelves as one Christmas present, the vegetable patch as another, and the red brick garden path as another! After about ten years I was once again trying to find a solution to the ladder to the bedroom problem and those clever Italian designers had come up with the paddle spiral. I bought those as quick as I had found them and we installed them without too much difficulty. What a relief that was!
Before putting the house on the market we gave it an updated paint front and back, choosing a pale yellow in contrast to the rather odd blue I had chosen a few years before. Heartbreaking to leave that house, that village and the village graveyard where I buried my parents, but Rick and I had a plan…
Sold 2015, £265,000