Ruined

I don’t know how it is for everyone else, but I often find the anticipation of work much more tiring than the actual work itself.

After months of waiting and thinking, it was a relief to pull on our ever attractive PPE and start making a mess.

Our first job, as marked out in Chris’s highly detailed house renovation Gantt chart, was to remove the old plaster from the solid walls. There are two reasons for doing this 1) because some of it is so crumbly it’s ready to fall off by itself and 2) because old houses need to breathe.

People who live in old houses will often find themselves battling with damp. The reason for this is that old houses were designed to breathe. Moisture wasn’t banished but controlled, being allowed to move through the walls and out to the exterior. Today, many old houses have been covered in cement render and plaster. These impermeable materials trap the damp within the walls and create all kinds of long-term problems.

While our house thankfully does not have an exterior render, it does have a thick coating of cement plaster on the inside, as well as cement render. Once removed, we are going to replace this with lime mortar and plaster, which is permeable and will allow the moisture to move through the wall.

So our first job was to take a lump hammer and chisel to the walls.

The good news was that much of the plaster was already so ruined that it fell off in big, satisfying chunks. In certain places, a simple kick with a boot brought chunks raining down.

Seeing what was behind the plaster was always interesting. Holes plugged with newspaper, the odd old preserved leaf or twig. Most disconcerting was the live woodlouse that appeared under one section.

While I started on the plaster removal Chris began dismantling the floor and walls in the utility room. Someone prior to us had started renovations on this house some time ago, and clearly lost interest. One of their projects had been to divide a room in half and put a raised floor in. As we planned to knock all three adjoining rooms into one big kitchen/diner, their DIY efforts were sadly wasted.

Despite the dust, and the aching limbs at the end of the day, I quite like the destructive part of DIY. It’s simple and straightforward. It also tends to go quicker than the fiddly finishing touches that come along at the end. Four years into living in our current home, we still haven’t gotten around to installing one particular entrance strip. It’s behind a curtain, so you don’t see it. Perhaps we’ll leave it for the next people who move into our house.

Today we got the keys to our new house. Walking through the doors, I think we both felt a mixture of relief, excitement, and absolute terror. Looking at the task ahead of us, it was difficult to build up the courage to start. So we started small.

Much of the build-up to getting the keys has been spent thinking, researching, and planning. The good thing about starting with a house from the bottom up is that you can do very nearly whatever you want. The difficulty was to decide what we might want, what we could afford, and how best to go about it.

Our first task was therefore to take stock. This involved getting into the attic to check joists, working out what sized staircase we could put in, and poking room beams to ascertain where there might be rot.

Another job was to work out what the old owners had left behind. The house had been barely occupied for the last forty years, used only as a holiday home, and a student digs at one point. However, we brought the house with the understanding any contents left would become ours.

This means we are now the proud owners of a 1980s washing machine, around 50 copies of National Geographic, and a cupboard full of baked beans, spices, and a mysteriously labelled ‘love potion’ the majority of which have best before dates from the 90s.

So, while tomorrow the real work begins, tonight I’m trying to find a collector of retro washing machines. We ate the beans, who pays attention to best before dates anymore?

There is something about a ruin that is more exciting than the comfort and convenience of a sleek and modern house. Depending on your viewpoint, they are full of flaws, or simply blessed with many quirks. Personally, I enjoy the unexpected nature of older houses. Tiny doorways may not be practical, and rusty ironworks always safe, but these little surprises are still more engaging than the uniformity of the modern house.

Life often turns on little things. Years ago, I filled out an application for a job the day before it closed. I hadn’t been inclined to apply, as I thought the job advert was confusing and unclear. Yet if I hadn’t answered that job advert I never would have met my boyfriend, and the last seven years would have been completely different.

A similar accident of fate occurred with our ruin. When I originally applied to view it, the agent told us it had sold. Later, an email arrived stating that it was back on the market, and we could view it, but only on a certain date. Unfortunately, we were busy that day, so we decided to pass. However, last minute, we booked in for an early viewing.

On reviewing the address, it turned out I’d muddled up my houses. Once we realised our mistake, we regretted it, as it added significantly more driving to our day. If we had known what house it was, we never would have gone.

This house looked bad on paper. It has no central heating, crumbling plasters, rotting window frames, needs a new roof, cracked walls, has Japanese knotweed in the garden, a surface drainage flooding issue and has the smallest kitchen and bathroom imaginable. Beyond this, it was at the very top of our price range. It had very little to recommend, and we were talking ourselves out of it before we’d even walked in the door.

What immediately attracted me to the house was the light. Four years ago, we brought a small cottage in a Welsh village. The house is half 18th century cottage and half 80s extension. It was rundown and uncared for, with a leaking roof, urine stained carpet in the bathroom and a shower that was so badly rotted that the wood supporting it disintegrated when touched.

Having worked hard to renovate our little cottage I was too attached to want to leave it without some kind of fight, however, the one thing I still dislike is how dark the rooms are.

Therefore, what attracted me to the new house was the light. Large, mismatched windows bring light streaming in from all angles, casting shadows on exposed brick and flaking paint. My sister tells me she thinks it looks haunted, yet it makes me think of a long-forgotten artist’s loft, where dried up paint and dusty canvases hint at a more active past.

Being able to buy the house wasn’t as simple as it might first appear. While the increase in the value of our first house, after the extensive renovations, meant we could easily have afforded a mortgage on the new house, it, unfortunately, wasn’t considered to be in a mortgageable state. We also doubted it would be feasible to live there while, for example, we replaced the roof. Luckily, generous family members were able to give us a short-term loan. That, along with most of our savings and a remortgage on our current property, gave us just enough to buy the house with £35,000 spare to do it up.

All of this means we now have around a year and £35K to turn a ruin into our home, before we need to sell our current house and repay everyone. Sound a little crazy? It probably is, but I really liked the light.