The Starting Place

Here, I’ll capture the initial state of the property when it was purchased, including some of the quirks of the building.

The property was described as a three-bed however, one of the bedrooms was an open space that led through to another, making it more of a large corridor than a bedroom. The property had been extended over time, with the original walls well over a foot deep, changing to more modern building materials in the portion that had been extended around the 1990s. The original part of the house had stone walls, which would have looked more typical of the area before being rendered at some point in time.

Another later addition to the house was this porch area that had certainly seen better days and had housed more birds than people in the last few years. The picture below shows the building from the inside, with a mystery third door on the floor that isn’t the door into the main house and isn’t the door to the outside.

The entrance porch with single skin breeze block walls and lots of “ventilation”.

The kitchen area made the house most exposed to the elements, with a roof comprised of the metal sides of vans that did very little to keep the rain out. Whatever was left from the old insulation and a poorly secured tarp was slowly peeling from the ceiling. An Aga was all that was left to show that the place had been a kitchen.

The kitchen with buckets to catch the water streaming in.

There were three other rooms downstairs: the bathroom, a living room and one that an estate agent would probably market as a “reception room”, a large space immediately after the front door. The bathroom had the classic pink, which seems mandatory on houses that are being demolished. Look next time you see a building that has been torn down; there will for sure be at least one room decorated pink. The same pink was in the living room with some oddly shaped patterns, maybe around furniture that was there at some point? We stored all our belongings in the living room for over a year, which did not serve them well and led to anything that had touched the floor needing to be thrown out due to mould.

The pink bathroom which you would not want to wash in.

The living room, with indoor/outdoor foliage in the window.

The stairs were terrifying; extremely steep with open treads and a head height that needed an exaggerated duck on the way down. Definitely not compliant with building regulations.

The upstairs was the most well-preserved part of the house, and it was the space that helped provide the vision of the place as a home. There were still quirks to be found on this floor; one bedroom had a wall built directly in front of a window! In the gap between the internal and external wall, there were large quantities of twigs and other nesting materials left in previous years by Jackdaws, the extent of which could be seen once the wall (and the roof!) had been removed.

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