Do It Yourself (DIY)

First House | Current House

I had a pretty good idea of the type of house I'd like - A little terraced house, in a nice area and in a position which wasn't overlooked by other houses and which didn't cost a lot of money. (Mortgages were a little daunting to me at that stage).

In order to find a house which satisfied all of these requirements, I was prepared, nay, keen to buy a house which needed a little work doing to it so as to provide an outlet for my DIY creativity.

After about 2 months of looking at areas where I'd like to live and then at houses, I found my house in Rossendale, Lancashire, UK. I think I was very lucky.

My house is one of the middle houses in a block of six terraced houses built just before the turn of the 20th century. The block faces a busy road but then there is just open farmland and hills beyond that both at the front and rear. Click here to view pictures of the views around my first house.

The main road at the front is convenient if not sometimes noisy but at the back you feel as if you're in your very own little farmhouse.

As for the inside of the house, it is originally of the two-up-two-down design. You would enter from the front door and walk via a vestibule into the lounge. From there you could walk into the kitchen at the rear. From the kitchen there's the back door, access to the cellar and the stairway up to the first floor. These stairs would have originally brought you straight into the rear bedroom through which you would have had to walk through in order to access the large front bedroom over the lounge. In the 1960's when inside bathrooms became the norm, this was achieved in my house my using one third of the area of the rear bedroom. This must have been a wonderful improvement for the occupiers at the time but it had the disadvantage of making the rear bedroom even more unusable.

Click here to view pictures of how my house looked when I moved in.

But I could see the potential of this house with a little work. The lounge and front bedroom were a little large and could stand loosing a little bit of space. This would allow a new staircase to be installed leading up from in front of the front door up into a new smaller landing sandwiched between the bedroom, bathroom and new second bedroom/study! The space recovered by removing the old staircase wouldn't make the new bedroom much bigger but it would be functionable and self contained. Also, the extra space in the kitchen after the old staircase removal would mean that it could be promoted to the status of 'dining kitchen'!

So with this all planned out in my mind, I went ahead and said I'd buy it. 2 months later on Friday 14th October 1994 the house was mine and I moved in the next day.

The big jobs

Over the next 8 years the whole house was renovated. The big jobs, in rough chronological order were:

• Decorate bathroom
• Clean stone at front of house
• Re-roof
• Install new staircase in new position
• Box in new staircase and define new room layout
• Install combi-boiler central heating system
• Install hidden cellar trapdoor in kitchen
• Install alarm system
• Decorate lounge and install log-burning stove
• Install new fitted kitchen
• Decorate new hall, staircase & landing
• Decorate new second bedroom
• Decorate new master bedroom
• Convert rear lean-to into a proper conservatory

Click here to view pictures of how this house looked when I moved out.

Click here to view the sales brouchure when my house came back on the market 2 years after I sold it.