This Old House

So, we moved.

We bought us a ‘doer upper’. A Victorian doer upper to be precise. We moved here two years ago, with the romantic fantasy of revitalising our tired old relic (complete with her 1970s decor and 3 bar electric fires) and turning heads by giving her a face lift, a boob job and a deep-pore facial. Frankly, hanging baskets were never going to cut it.

Right. Let’s just say that I found my first gray eyebrow hair yesterday.

Allow me to illustrate the scope of the task we have undertaken.

This (right) is soot. When you take down the ceiling of a very old house, you will find that there is lots of it. If you’ve got a hole, it will find it. In your plastic decontamination sheet that is. I sealed in the old fella with duct tape – it was like a scene from E.T. and yet there was soot in my knickers. Whaaaa?!

Above is the ‘Before’ picture at the rear of the house, complete with what might have been described, in polite Victorian circles, as an outhouse with a view.

And this was the view of the front garden, before and after some hard work. As you can see, it’s still a work in progress.

Once we had put the rear half of the house in a skip, along with my nervous system, I felt strangely better. It was time to renew. And renew we have. Although still a work in progress, our old house is becoming our new home, and we have left another generational imprint on the life of this wonderful building, which will outlive the lot of us.