Home Renovation

Popping in to the house to see progress as we’d been told the electrics and plumbing was being worked on. This is when a few more issues started to come out of the woodwork. Plumbing We’re due to have an en suite bathroom in the loft room and there was always a question of how […]

Why did the roof come off? So the roof had to come off for several reasons: The tiles were shot. We’d had to patch the holes when we moved in 18 months ago and you could still see sky when we went to clear it out before moving out. The rafters were rotten. They needed

Ceiling height Something we hadn’t realised about converting the loft of a Victorian terrace (and hadn’t come up in our conversations with the architect, structural engineer or surveyors) is that sometimes there isn’t enough head height. This revelation from the builders caught us out as both the ground and first floors had such high ceilings

Stone cladding The 70s and 80s have a lot to answer for, particularly in the way people apparently thought it was a good idea to cover the front of their houses in concrete blocks or ‘stone cladding’ which sounds way nicer than it looks when applied as was on the front of our house. So

Why the cost is a mystery So when we planned to do the work initially, we’d asked for the first fix to come in at around £150k for both the loft conversion and the rear kitchen diner extension. The trouble with this is that you aren’t able to get builders quotes to find out the

We’ve just been told the builders can start soon (despite the fact we don’t have quotes from them in order to pick one) and therefore have started on the lounge aka our sanctuary and only room that was as yet untouched by the tools of demolition. The one time those beautiful high Victorian ceilings just

13 months and counting. When we took on this project we did not envisage this taking so long. Talk about biting off more than you can chew. I guess we’ll never know how much of that was down to Covid related delays, how much was down to trying to work together with the neighbour, how

Planning permission is infuriating. Even if (or especially if?) you do things by the book. We had planned to start structural build work in August 2020. In May I drafted up a beautifully organised project plan. Looking back now that was clearly more than a little ambitious and we’re coming up to a year of

We were ready to move from our first place and had been looking for a suitable property for about 12 months when we found a run down mid terrace. The main criteria was price and no more than 8 miles from the centre of London (so we could both still cycle to work), which left

Stripping back wallpaper is easy. Stripping back wood panelling is easy. Stripping back ancient paint to the original plasterwork without damaging it too much IS NOT. We have spent months of weekends on this and the progress is painfully slow. We started with a regular scraper for the paint… This one was the best one!