Six years ago we bought out first house.

We had spent years saving for 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. Anything really nice was out of our budget, and the things that weren’t still needed work to make them how we’d like. We figured it’s wasteful to buy a house with a usable kitchen we’d only want to rip out and replace, so it made sense to find something totally horrible, a real doer-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, and a kitchen that was 1.5m wide. When the oven door opened, it blocked you walking past because it touched the other wall.

We were naïve and had no idea what we were doing, but we loved it (mostly). We got straight to work tearing everything out so we could start again. We ended up removing all the 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 on the walls, 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 size of the kitchen/dining room.

All in all it took nine months, and we had builders for five of them. We lived with Bec’s sister, and 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 there forever. We’d chosen every detail and it was all how we wanted it.

There were definitely some traumatic times (dealing with builders is hard), but overall we loved immersing 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 of things… which leads you to think: if we did it again, what would we do differently? What could we do better?