I’m often asked where people should start when it comes to a renovation project. The sheer scale of some old buildings bring with them a hefty dose of overwhelm. The romance of them peaks your excitement, your dreams looms large and then the reality of making those dreams into something real, something tangible, becomes insurmountable. The answer I give is simple, you just have to start somewhere, any job is a step forward. But sometimes it pays to rip up the to-do list and start again, which is exactly what we had to do.
There was once a list. A huge, handwritten list. It covered sheaf after sheaf of paper, inked in my, often illegible, scrawl and pinned to the side of the fridge with a heavy duty magnet.
It was a list of everything that needed doing to rescue this house, exhaustive we thought at one time, until each week something more got added. The rotting fascias, the wood and slate housing for the bell on the roof, the missing red clay ridge tile on the pig barn, the creaky old shutter hinges, the broken atelier door.
There were details of niggling little jobs that needed sorting - draughty doors, sparking switches and then sweeping statements too - renovate cellar, design kids rooms, create a garden.
We would refer to this list in the early days, picking random jobs from it, often spending hours working out how to solve each problem. Everything seemed to need tools we didn’t have, materials that weren’t readily available, or required us to watch video after video on YouTube.
We tore into rooms haphazardly, taking down walls to open up original proportions, stripping layers and layers of wallpaper and uncovering more and more jobs to add to the list.
We went along like this quite happily, until one day I stood in the middle of the salon, with its crumbling walls, damaged panelling and electrical cables hanging from the ceiling and started to panic.
I knew that the bank balance was dwindling. That our renovation budget was being hit hard by the cost of plumbing and electrics and septic tanks. I knew too that the little bit of money I earned writing for magazines each month wasn’t nearly enough to cover the living costs of six people. Food and the bills involved in just running the house at the bare minimum were slowly chipping away at the precious little left in the bank.
The house needed to start paying her way. I stood in the empty salon, running my finger through the dust on the table, watching the sun dancing on the pockmarked walls and realised that this wasn’t going to work.
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