I’m typing this on the sofa looking out at mature shrubs and trees, the rustling leaves are starting to turn yellow. Propelled by the residual energy of Storm Amy, white clouds clip across a blue sky while a squirrel scurries over the grass between tree and flower bed.
Behind me, all is chaos. The furniture is shoved haphazardly to the centre of the living room, because today is day 1 of the heating install. In the garden, sleek black air source heat pump units await connection. And not a moment too soon: we’ve made do with ineffectual, expensive to run, electric radiators for more than a year now.
Our not-so-new home is a grade II listed former farmhouse, whose fields were long since swallowed up by the suburb. We bought this place for its uneven charm. From the first time I saw the front, I have loved the way the door sits slightly off centre between the two-up two-down windows. Yorkshire practicality beats the Georgian mania for symmetry, a triumph of function over façadism.
And now we’re in, we discover more quirks. 250 or so years of uses and abuses layered one on top of the other in the fabric of this building. The place had not been lived in for 18 months before we took possession, and routine maintenance slipped a while before that.
Our first task was to stop the water getting in from above – roof slate repairs and like-for-like replacement of the wooden gutters whose failure made the stone walls damp. The before and after photos show what a difference this has made, without us doing anything to the walls themselves.
To make the inside more liveable, we painted the parlour, a bedroom for ourselves, and the kitchen walls where a previous occupant’s smoking habit had literally left its mark. The nicotine chicken was a quirk too far.
A little wood burning stove went into the parlour on December 19th. That room at least started to feel cosy. With a massive tree in the dining room, we ate our Christmas lunch from a porcelain dinner service gifted by the vendors who told us it belonged with the house. To warm our spirits, I regaled my long-suffering family with the awful self-published poetry of an early 19th Century resident.
First job of the New Year was to stop the water seeping in from below with a full replacement of the drains. Removing a concrete driveway hard up against the wall of the house should also help things to dry out some more. Carpet tiles laid straight onto the solid kitchen floor had been trapping damp for years. The chequerboard of ceramic tiles underneath are lovely but in a poor state. We’ll decide what to do with them later.
For want of a gutter repair, the plaster in a couple of rooms had failed, been patched up with modern gypsum plaster, and predictably failed again. Since fixing the root cause, we’ve had those areas redone with traditional lime plaster, which allows the walls to breathe the way they were built to.
With our bedroom ceiling also repaired in lime (and in less danger of burying us in our bed) we were able to bring more of our possessions out of storage where they’d been since the move.
The warm, dry spring coincided with a houseful of family and friends coming to stay, and we made the most of the garden, while the building aired some more. Igor, our elderly cat, claimed his territory and came to an understanding with the fox we suspect is living at the bottom of the garden. We would spot them both snoozing on the grass a safe distance apart.
Then the rains returned, and so did the musty odour. Our youngest son launched a persuasive campaign to address the underlying source of the smell. Old carpets had to go even if it meant bare boards underfoot.
Now the nights are getting longer and days colder. Just in time we’re able to get the new heating system installed. The 8 week service level standard for planning permission and listed building consent turns into a minimum of 16 when conditions are added, such as providing samples of driveway gravel for approval by the planners. But finally the required consents are in place.
Out with the 1970s gas boiler from the kitchen fireplace. Out with the terrifying open header tank on the wall in the bathroom. Out with the tangles of redundant pipework in lead, steel and copper that weave through shallow voids under the floors.
In with the low carbon future. The economics of the UK’s wonky energy market may or may not stack up to make our air source heat pump setup more cost effective than gas. But this is a climate emergency, don’t you know. Once the new system is in we can consider more insulation, along with solar panels and battery storage to optimise the emissions and running costs.
We’re doing our best to reuse old pipe runs and keep historic floorboards intact, but today the house must feel a little bruised and battered. Still to come are the full rewiring, window repairs, and repointing the external walls in lime mortar. We aim to get the whole place naturally dry, ventilated, and breathing the way builders of this solid stone structure intended.
By tackling the renovation iteratively, we ought to avoid the pitfalls of Big Design Up Front. If we’d rewired before we moved in, I’d have specified many extra sockets and light fittings just in case. Having lived with the minimum viable product of temporary electrics for 12 months, I can now see where we’ve run extension leads, and will only put power points where we know they’re needed.
People ask, “when will it all be finished?” As long as a house is lived in, it is never done.
It will all be worth it, if not in monetary value then at least in Stewart Brand’s wonderful chapter heading from ‘How Buildings Learn‘: the Romance of Maintenance.
Matt Edgar writes here 