To say this wasn’t the plan wouldn’t be quite true, but we certainly hadn’t planned to take on a project of this scale! That’s what a pandemic will do I suppose.
I (Rosie), have always wanted to do a ‘Big’ renovation or house build. We’ve done up houses on a much smaller scale, I’ve always lived in ongoing projects and perhaps I’m a sucker for punishment. But we both love a project and are pretty handy. It’s that slightly naive ‘how hard can it be’ part of us that figured we could do it.
Long story short – we sold our perfectly lovely house at the start of the COVID lockdowns, which was a plan that had been in the works for a while for a variety of reasons, and started looking for something we could do a fair bit of work on.
The trouble was, that we were looking in the Cotswolds and it seemed many people from urban areas had decided that it would be a good idea to move to a more rural area because of the pandemic. No complaints from us – it’s beautiful here!
The house market boomed and the fixer-uppers that ordinarily might have sat on the market for a little while were disappearing SO fast. People didn’t mind overspending because they were planning to stay a long time.
So how did we find our house? A friendly estate agent, known neighbours and a huge number of ??? about the structural state of the building.
Seriously – get to know your estate agents, they can give you a heads up of properties coming on the market before they go live.
Saying that, there was no real advantage here, just that we heard about it first. We knew there was a lot of work to be done and it was all covered up pretty well, but the giant cracks up the side of the building were a pretty good giveaway. She wasn’t the most attractive house, but we could see the potential and quickly got to work sketching.
We knew this was an old farmhouse, once had an orchard and outbuildings. It even had. a detached stone barn as part of the land, alongside a steeply banked garden that seemed too big to think about at first! The stone carved plaque on the front gave away some of the houses secrets – with ‘1729’ softly engraved, not quite centred on an ornate border.
The layout was odd. The risks seemed huge, and we had fewer answers than questions, but the location was fantastic and we knew this could be the one if we could overcome some of the huge number of issues.
As a historic home planning permission from the local council can be difficult (plus the previous owners had a failed planning application) and it’s nearly impossible to budget for unknown repairs at this stage. We could see some of the basics:
Yes, that’s the short list. But we knew it could be so much more than this and that’s the scary bit. However, fortunately for us, despite properties everywhere selling super fast, everyone else was a bit cautious of this one too. Builders by now (late Summer 2020) were also fully booked for more than 12 months and prices had sky-rocketed so that put paid to most buyers planned.
So dozens of lists, budget planning and an almost six-month purchasing process later, it was ours. Just the small job of what-on-earth do we do next to figure out.
Stay tuned to follow our journey. We may be two years in, but this adventure just beginning!
