This Old House

I feel like we’ve really landed on our feet here in England.  We had a checklist of sorts when we bought our little Victorian end of terrace house and it’s worked out even better than expected.  It’s relatively easy to find a property that satisfies expectations of location, size, and style, but I think what’s stood out for us is the ease at which our new base has allowed us to become part of the local community.  We were attracted to this town because it has the lively vibe of a tourist seaside town, but it’s also a ‘normal’ small British town.

Our little house was tenanted for the past seventeen years and had developed many of the traits that you may associate with long tenancies.  Landlords have a terrible reputation here in the UK and our property seems to have been subject to minimal maintenance, regular painting and not much more.  We joke that there’s seventeen layers of paint stopping the doors from closing, or that we must work through when sanding back any wooden surface.

It wasn’t in the original plan (I’m realising that nothing these days seems to follow “the original plan” ….) but Helen came back to the UK a couple of months before me and so was able to do the first round of work to make the place feel welcome.  It’s cliched, but pulling up old carpet, deep cleaning and furnishing went a long way to making our house our home.  I know that Helen felt like a bit of an outsider at times when we were in Aotearoa New Zealand, and I appreciate the effort that she made so that my first impression when arriving back was a welcoming one.

Our little house was built in the 1850s.  That’s positively ancient by Aotearoa New Zealand standards where our oldest surviving building (The Mission House in Kerikeri) was built only thirty years prior!  I remember visiting it as a youngster on family holidays and being amazed that a building could be that old!

Coming from a country with such a young history, I grew up thinking “Victorian” was an ancient era, but the reality in the UK is that this was the peak of the industrial revolution where quality public buildings were built on a scale that many of the ‘new’ industrial processes facilitated.  In fact, last year when we were looking to buy an old, disused chapel to convert to a home, they were all from Victorian times.  You can read about (and see a range of pics of considered properties) here.

We Bought a House! – Ripening Nicely

Our house would have been built as a worker’s cottage and so lacks some of the *ahem* quality and features that some of the same era houses of worship, business and ale consumption that surround us have. Regardless, we set about making this our land-base for the foreseeable future.  It’s a bit weird- having rented for so long in Dubai (and before), this is the first property that Helen and I have owned together to become our home.  In a way I feel like I’m doing this first-home-thing about twenty years later than ‘normal’ people. It’s kind of fun juggling room contents from one room to another and then back again. The week or so it took to paint the timber floor was like a living game of hop-scotch, where only parts of the floor were ‘safe’ to step on. We’ve become quite used to living with a bit of chaos!

Both Helen and I are handy and not afraid to get our hands dirty and we tend to choose our own sub-projects and crack on with them.  I’ve run multi-million-dollar projects for most of my career in real estate development and have dealt with my fair share of challenging clients.  In the Middle East, I knew that if the Client’s project manager started a meeting with “Sheikh has just come back from Venice / Morocco / Paris…”, we had some major thematic style changes coming to the project.  But what a career in development didn’t teach me, is that the most demanding of all clients, is the wife.  Only fifty percent of us are sure that we agreed that the upstairs floor should be matt black.

Enjoying the nice summer weather, I sorted out the garden, including building some repurposed-pallet furniture.  The pinnacle of my repurposing-carpentry skills is a multi-level pallet herb planter-table combination, and a compost bin fashioned from a chest of drawers; both of which I’m very proud of!

We were hopeful that we’d be able to sand back and varnish the upstairs timber floors, but the timber proved to be not as pretty as expected, so out with the paintbrush…

Helen has become a bit of a furniture restorer and up-cycler, and worked wonders with (amongst others) a set of chairs, and upcycled a baby cot into a drying rack! We called in the professionals though to upgrade the windows and to bang a window into a door into our little backyard.

We reached a point though were we realised we were focusing on the easy jobs, and kind of ignoring some of the potentially bigger issues.  One of those is damp.  You expect a house that’s approaching two hundred years old to have a few issues and it took us a few months to accumulate the courage to pull up the kitchen and bathroom lino.  It was all (relatively) good news though; the kitchen damp was due mainly to the lino trapping moisture in the concrete floor, and the bathroom damp from a slow-dripping pipe, and not ground water passing through the retaining wall as feared.  It feels like a bit of a puzzle at times – for example, damp in many older houses is caused by the use of incompatible modern building materials and insufficient ventilation i.e., non-breathable, and non-porous, rather than raising damp, which a burgeoning repair industry will claim to fix for you.

We were planning on renovating both the kitchen and bathroom and I had hoped that we’d get the kitchen done on this visit, before we head back to our floating home in Thailand for the northern winter.  But, because of having to sort out the damp issue first, that’s slid back to our return to England next year.  It’s been reassuring looking back over photos to select to go with this blog.  The “before” photos remind me how much progress we have made during the past months. We’ve still more work to do when we return next year, but we’re well on the way to making our house our home.

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