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 know, 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