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 first house in Rossendale, Lancashire, UK. I think I was very lucky.
My house was one of the middle houses in a block of six
terraced houses built just before the turn of the 20th
century. The block faced a busy road but then there was
just open farmland and hills beyond that both to the
front and rear. Photos of the views around my first house.
Photos of how my house looked when I moved in.
The main road at the front was convenient if not sometimes noisy but at the back you felt as if you were 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 step through the front door into a vestibule and then into the lounge. From there you could walk into the kitchen at the rear. From the kitchen there was a back door, access to the cellar and the stairway up to the first floor. The 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 the 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 quite small and unusable.
I could see the potential of the 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 a new second bedroom/study! The space recovered by removing the old staircase would make the back bedroom usable again and for the first time, not a throughway. Also, the extra space in the kitchen after the old staircase was removed 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.
Over the next 8 years the whole house was renovated, mainly by myself. The big jobs, in rough chronological order were:
Photos of how this house looked when I moved out.
View the sales brouchure when my house came back on the market 2 years after I sold it.
