Georgian House Renovation Up North - 5 Years and Counting

[stewjohnst]

By pure coincidence, it happens to be 5 years to the day today that I got the keys to the fixer upper that was/is my first home so what better time to share it and where I've got to with the PH collective as a bit of interest/motivation to those trying to soldier on through their own builds on here.

I'll kind of dump into here as a mix of chronological/room based activity for those that are interested but first, a bit of cool story bro'

Back in 2010, I'd been living down south in Weybridge for about 10 years, renting and drinking/socialising my life away, getting fatter, older and no less single than I was when I first moved down there. Certainly no nearer to being on the property ladder whilst down there. It was therefore time to sort my life out a bit.

I had a change of employer and a move to consulting in April 2010 meant I could more or less live anywhere so I sat myself down one night and decided to draw out what I actually wanted from life (really, I did and do recommend it). I then put the picture away and forgot about it for ages.

I landed a client assignment in Leeds and rented for six month to decide if I liked being home and as I did, decided to buy a house in summer of 2011. I was after starter house as it was just me so I was looking in the region of 100 - 130k for a 2-3 bed Wimpey style home just to bounce around in.

However, as I was stood at the window looking at the various houses ,the estate agent stuck the following thing in the window, and it stopped me dead. I didn't know why at the time but it intrigued me, the price was close enough to my budget to be worth a punt and it looked so ridiculous, I went in and asked about it.



It turned out to be a Northern Rock repossession and it was priced so low as a dutch auction to get it shifted. 15 minutes later, I was parked outside in my suit, using my shiny company car as a stepladder to get over the locked gates and have a walk around to inspect the house.

I knew right then I wanted it...

Edited by stewjohnst on Friday 2nd September 01:19

Edited by stewjohnst on Sunday 4th September 23:27

[stewjohnst]

I'll speed up the story for you but for me it wasn't until a few months later and I was unpacking boxes that I found the notebook I'd sketched the picture of what I wanted back in December of 2010.

Looking at it now its obvious why something in the back of my mind had made me go in and look at that house...



Anyway, as it was a sale with a lot of interest, they held an open day so my brother (handily an architect) and I went down to view the interior, it was massive and needed a fair amount of work but nothing that couldn't be resolved with hard labour and my view was it was worth it's value in bricks and mortar if it all fell down. We then spent the rest of the open day walking around exclaiming how expensive the woodworm, damp, electrics, etc would be to resolve for anyone else in earshot to put them off.

I left the first open day and offered the £165,000 price that got me first in the queue to start the paperwork but this was soon outbid. The estate agent wouldn't tell me the revised offer so I had to sit there saying out numbers and I sued the ebay strategy of picking random values so in the end I got if for £211,000.

Even though they were happy with my offer, the deal wasn't final until contracts were exchanged so I spent a busy three weeks phoning the estate agent, bank and my solicitor each day asking what they needed until we got to completion and I got the keys on the 1st September.

There was another open day between my offer and completion so naturally, I also went to the second open day to loudly declare the house a money pit/death trap to get shot of people once again.

[stewjohnst]

So day 1, this is what the house looked like

Outside

The previous owner had done a runner and left about £4,000 of Espace on the drive and I was looking forward to requesting RK details, sending them an invoice for parking it on my land and then taking ownership of the car and flogging it as four grand would have fixed the hole in the bathroom ceiling quite nicely. However, the estate agent decided to be helpful by paying (yes, they paid) to get it towed away for scrap before I got there

Pointing totally knackered due to not having any downpipe attached for ages...


Gable end rotten and slates loose/missing allowing rain into the house



Kitchen


Note the water on the floor as the utility room had a leak in it...

[stewjohnst]

There was one inside toilet, a separate bathroom...

...and this 'en-suite' minus any dividing wall in one of the top bedrooms?



Also no extraction up there so it had encouraged damp and woodworm to take hold

One of the other bedrooms had been used as a barbers shop at some time in the past.

[stewjohnst]

PSRG said:

I reckon it was 2 houses originally... You can see where the other front door might have been, to the left of the current one

It's always been one house but it dates from around 1750, the door originally went into the room on the left but it was sealed up later and an entrance hall created to get through to the back of the house that was built on to and so you didn't walk directly into a front room.

The whole house has ups and downs all over the shop with unexpected floor level changes.

Oddly, I I do t have a floor plan but will knock one up this afternoon.

Don't forget this is a bit of a time travel thread, a lot of work has already been done and I'll post as I try to catch up to present day.

[stewjohnst]

BlueHave said:

Excellent man maths

Budget = £130k

Spend = £215k

Thats a whole lot of house for just over £200k and all because its in the middle of Yorkshire. If it had been in commuter belt London or Surrey, Somerset, Kent or Buckinghamshire it would have been more than double that.

I know, having lived in prime Surrey commuter belt where my old landlord offered to sell me my 2 bed flat for £250,000 back in 2008, I'm rather pleased I'm a northerner again

[stewjohnst]

A few more before photos.

I hadn't really set a budget but I had planned to do this mainly diy - firstly because my time living in London drinking and not going to the gym any more had made me a big fat and secondly I like to be doing *something* whether that's fettling an old Japanese 4x4 or house doesn't make much difference to me.

Aerial view showing the back half of the house.


Hallway to top floor

Inside toilet


Stained glass bit of Yorkshire stuck in there

Edited by stewjohnst on Friday 2nd September 23:03

Edited by stewjohnst on Friday 2nd September 23:05

[stewjohnst]

Few more before pics...

[stewjohnst]

As requested, here's the floor plan.

Had to draw it just for pH as in five years, I've never actually had one drawn up...









It's about 3000 square feet, give or take.

[stewjohnst]

The plan was to move in and just work my way round making it tolerable to live in. As a single bloke, it was habitable but the kitchen was manky, the bathroom completely skanky and the rest of the house was just an artex explosion.

So I started with the bathroom as the shower was running only cold, the bath, well the pictures say it all...







This was never going to be the main bathroom long term as it's too small for the size of house but as I didn't plan on moving for 15-20 years, I spent a small budget getting this one finished. I needed the kitchen and bathrooms decent to release a bit if equity in 2 years time at the next remortgage for bigger jobs.

[stewjohnst]

Not only was the shower gapping due to mould, it didn't drain properly, had poor pressure and didn't get hot. It would have been more effective to hold a rat above my head until it pissed on me for a wash.

The wood ceiling and 70's panelling were also a lovely design feature that I opted to get rid of.



The reason the shower wouldn't drain became clear when I lifted the floor to check the drains, they had managed to lay the waste so level you could play snooker on it and the small amount of drop from the shower floor didn't push the water along the stupid long horizontal run fast enough to not back up.

[stewjohnst]

LaurasOtherHalf said:

On the house by the way, don't take this the wrong way as it obviously had huge potential but as originally purchased, it had a certain "look" to it didn't it? It's how I imagined Fred West's house to have been done!

Ha ha, I doubt your suspicions will alter much when I get to the bit about the door I found that was boarded up behind a wall and bricked up...

[stewjohnst]

KAgantua said:

Nice one.
How extensive is the cellar? Does it go all the way under the house?

If not, have you had a look under the rooms on Ground that its not under by lifting the floorboards? you might be in for a surprise

I checked when I moved in but the cellar is only under one half of the original house, the rest of the house is just sat on earth.

The cellar still has the old servants tables where they'd prep food and parts of the old servant Bell call (not working).

It's crying out for an offic/conversion to wine cellar (not that I have any except the half drunk bottle of Marlborough in the fridge).

[stewjohnst]

Fermit The Krog and Sexy Sarah said:

Shall enjoy reading, I love a good house project - we have one our self at the minute (thread else where)

Does it have much in the way of garden(s)?

Have been watching your thread too and can relate to the joys of repointing chimneys, etc.

The house has a good sizes garden but it's probably a little bit small for what you'd expect for the size of the house.

It's was pretty much a blank canvas apart from a beautiful old magnolia tree at the back.

Here's how it looked when I moved in.

[stewjohnst]

Back to the bathroom.

The bathroom was in the Victoria end of the house but the low roof didn't make sense. The room next door had a 3m ceiling and the bathroom was barely over 2m.

I started stripping the tiles and noticed they were tiled up behind the ceiling so figured it was obviously false.



So I got my lump hammer and had a nosey...



They'd hidden a perfectly good high ceiling! Of course, there's no way they'd have done that to cover up any kind of botched roof repair/plant damage they'd never bothered to fix...


Doh!

[stewjohnst]

You can see there water ingress and the purlin/beams were wet so I decided to take the ceiling down to inspect the full extent of the damage.

I'd been to toolstation far too many times that day already so devised something that probably belongs in the 'a bit Council' thread to go under my hard hat and limit the amount of dust in my hair/face.



Taking down the ceiling also revealed the lack of any loft insulation at all and as this part of the house is just a two brick thick skin with no cavity, this was added to the list of jobs.





Next job was clearing the floor and tracing all the wastes and plumbing. About the time I snapped the head off the hammer, I went and got a proper crowbar. For reasons that become clear later, I'm glad I did.

[stewjohnst]

The floorboards were uneven in the bathroom and as I was planning on having the floor tiled, I decided to jigsaw out the lot and lay in some wbp plywood to get the floor level and avoid a step in height to the bathroom floor.

Now, I'd turned off the water but I hadn't bothered to drain the central heating as I wasn't planning on taking the old radiator off the wall yet.

We all have those moments in life where one half of your brain says something isn't right but your other half says carry on its fine. Sort of like your spidey sense tingling but you ignore it and that's what I was doing as I merrily jigsawed through the floorboards.

There's was a second where the noise of wood being cut changed to a weird clanking sound (as I cut through the still pressurised central heating pipes) before water started pissing everywhere.

stting my pants I grabbed the crowbar and ripped up the boards frantically trying to get at the burst pipes. Seconds later, I was sat with a thumb on each end of the cut pipe, soaked through, stinking of and tasting old 2pence pieces thinking "What the fk do I do now?" I managed to sort it by kinking one pipe right back and pointing the other at a plastic tub while I ran downstairs to open the drain cock to drop the pressure.

Heres the immediate aftermath.

Edited by stewjohnst on Sunday 4th September 23:30

[stewjohnst]

Putting the bathroom back together like, I'd battened out the exterior walls and insulated with 100mm celotex and slightly thinner in the ceiling to leave a ventilation gap for the open eaves.

The ceiling and walls were also given a moisture/vapour barrier. I have no previous skill in any of this, I actually work with computer systems in my day job and just decided to do everything myself (bar electrics and skilled labour) on the basis of what's the worst that could happen (being hosed down by your central heating, clearly).

I redid all the plumbing for bath, shower, sink and central heating and fitted the bath, shower and sink myself. The shower valve did my tits in leaking all the time until I had a eureka moment that up until now I'd been plumbing everything in 15mm and 22mm for the water and heating but a 15mm connection into an imperial fitting is going to leak.

I bought a new towel rail more in keeping with the look I wanted and installed that too. As I was redoing the heating pipes, rather than add underfloor heating pads, I just extended the radiator pipe run in a bit of a loop near to the floor so it warmed up the tiles when the heating was on.

Youll notice not I didn't bother with tile backer board but just a mix of moisture resistant plasterboard and normal board. I'm not one for spending years in a shower or bath so didn't see it as a major risk. Touch wood, five years on it is all still fine.

I went with porcelain tiles with a riven/slate effect. They're more practical than real slate for the bathroom as they don't need much care/sealing, etc to stay in good nick and are not porous at all. I wanted a look for the bathroom that wasn't particularly showy but would age well without it needing to be redecorated too quickly once finished.

[stewjohnst]

Ilovejapcrap said:

Great thread but cutting those floor boards nooooo.

You can't get good boards nowadays should have taken up carefully de nailed and kept to one side.

You could also use to make other floors good.

Anyway good thread

Don't worry, I did - apart from the ones they'd battered previously and when I was frantically trying to get at the water leak.

The building is listed and I've been as sensitive as I can throughout and been in touch with conservation all the way through.

There was no way to avoid a step up to the bathroom without cutting and taking them out complete without cutting would have meant taking down the stud wall as they ran under it :/

[stewjohnst]

In parallel to getting the bathroom sorted, the most pressing thing when I bought it was making it weatherproof and fixing the damp.

The roof was the biggest gamble when I bought the place as I wasn't sure how much could be saved at the back versus having to take it all off. I'd estimated a max of about 10k worst case but I wasn't sure how extensive the rot was and therefore how much would have to be lifted off.

Here's what the roof looked like when I moved in,