Moving day

Tue, 11 Aug 2026 19:35:07 GMT

On Wednesday 29th July we finally completed on the sale and purchase of our old and new houses. It took a little over six months to get everything sorted. Selling our house happened extremely quickly but the purchase was very complicated because it wasn’t mortgagable in a normal sense.

The previous owners had legally made it two leaseholds (with the Land Registry) but there was no planning and the conversion was so bad that any mortgage company that looked at the house could see they weren’t separate enough that they’d accept the risk.

We spent a while getting gaslighted by the estate agents and sellers that the problem was our financial situation or that it was the banks we were trying, but they eventually conceeded the problem was with the property. We went via a specialist broker and found a building society that specialises in tricky properties to mortgage it, they were slow but they did come through in the end.

All of this took months, multiple surveys and valuations and a lot of to-and-fro. Our buyers were very patient throughout luckily. It all went right down to the wire because our vendors were very disorganised despite having plenty of notice of the completion date and in the end, we exchanged less than 24 hours before we completed which was quite stressful.

The move itself was pretty smooth we had help from a removals company and we cleaned the old house and cycled the three minutes to the new place.

We’ve had the house for two weeks now but have yet to stay overnight, we’ve been stripping out old carpets, wallpaper and one of the kitchens. We’re working from the living room in the day which is the most normal room and then cycling back to Bec’s sister’s place to stay with them.

On the day we completed we submitted for planning to amalgamate it back to one house, it will take two months to get an answer. There’s no reason for them to say no but you never know I guess. So in the meantime we’ll keep it separate and are preparing each one without removing the dividing wall.

We’re talking with our architect Ulf and some consultants on how to get the ball rolling with the EnerPHit renovation.

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The backstory

Mon, 22 Jun 2026 19:35:07 GMT

Six years ago we bought out first house.

We had spent years saving to get ourselves a deposit and were finally ready to start looking. We’re quite particular people and we soon realised that buying a house that was “nice” was not for us, maybe this sounds stupid, but it’s true. We realised that anything really nice was out of our budget and the things that were still needed work to make it how we’d like. We figured its wasteful to get a house with a usable kitchen we’d want to rip out and replace, so it made sense to find something totally horrible, a real do-er-upper so we could go whole hog.

So that’s what we did, we found a house with only one toilet, the original outdoor one, a kitchen that was 1.5m wide, where when the oven opened, it blocked you walking past it because it touched the other wall.

We were naïve and had no idea what we were doing but we’d loved it (mostly), we got straight to work tearing everything out so we could start again. We ended up removing all floors, ceilings and walls — when you stepped through the front door you stepped down onto the soil and could look up through the lattice of wood to the roof tiles. It was extreme but it meant we could start from scratch.

We replaced everything: water, gas and electricity mains. We rewired and replumbed. We used lime plaster for the walls and laid underfloor heating and put a reclaimed junckers beech sports hall floor across the whole ground floor. We got planning permission and extended out into the garden to double the kitchen/dining room size.

All in all in took nine months, we had builders for five months of that. We lived with Bec’s sister my parents remortgaged their house to lend us more cash when we ran out. We finally moved in days before Christmas 2020.

We were exhausted but proud of everything, I thought we’d live here forever, we’d chosen every detail and it was all how we wanted it.

There was definitely some traumatic times (dealing with builders is hard) but overall we loved immersiving ourselves in the project and getting stuck in doing as much as we could ourselves. It’s a steep learning curve and you only get one shot at a lot things... which leads you to think, if we could do it again, how could we do it different, what could we do better.

In January Bec spotted a house for sale, ten minutes from where we live now, that was a wreck but with a lot of potential. At first I was a little incredulous that Bec was even considering it but I knew right away it was a great opportunity even if I was like, do we really want to do all that hard work all over again.

We went to see the house, and it was even worse in real life they also told us it was legally complex because although it was advertised as one house, it had been very poorly (and not to building regs) converted into flats — and they’d even had it changed with land registry. But we could see it was a great opportunity and in a perverse way we thought if it’s this offputting then maybe we’ve got a better chance of a successful bid.

Anyway jumping six months to now, we’re still working it all out legally but we’re nearly there now. We’ve sold our house and should be moving by the end of the summer.

The house will take us years, we’ll have to do it in phases to make it affordable but we’re exicted for the challenge. We’re keen to try and do it to the EnerPHit standard — (sort of Passivhaus, but not quite as it’s a retrofit of an existing building). Which really ups the ante in terms of the challenge but it feels like the right thing to do (especially considering the extreme heat we’ve had in London these past few weeks).

So begins the beginning of the journey and I’m going to document the process here. Let’s goooooo

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RetroPHit.haus

Moving day

The backstory