How To Design & Renovate Your Way Up The Housing Ladder - Part 1
The reality of serial renovation, take my Reno Life Compatibility Questionnaire, and how we designed & remodeled our first home, including floor plans.
My husband and I never set out to become property renovators or developers, in fact when we met, I couldn’t have thought of a more dreadful fate, how times change. Everything we have achieved has been done in our spare time, in between full time jobs. We are, in fact, accidental renovators, who have managed to climb the housing ladder through hard graft, not getting the trades in wherever possible, and extremely late nights and working weekends to achieve the holy grail of a mortgage-free life.
If you’re starting out on the housing highway and have aspirations of one day owning the house of your dreams and becoming mortgage-free, then read on. The way we have achieved it is by no means the only way and none is more valid than another, so I’m not making myself out to be some kind of guru, far from it. But, we knew what we wanted for our future life when we were both quite young and that meant climbing the ladder, being honest with ourselves and doing all the work instead of paying for it.
So, if that’s you, then hello. Be warned though, it’s not an easy path to take. When everyone else is enjoying the sunshine, seeing friends for lunch and picnicking in the park, you’ll be covered in brick dust, half way up a ladder wondering where you left the screwdriver and your sanity.
If you do follow the same path as us (see last week’s free introductory post) then you’ll spend a huge chunk of your adult life not having fun. I don’t care what any overly joyful ‘reno-obsessed influencer’ on Instagram says, doing the vast majority of DIY yourself and in your spare time is about as much fun as a barium enema party with Donald Trump. Do it over and over again for 27 years and there will be times when you lose the will to live and would quite happily settle for a caravan.
You will make memories that now seem hysterically funny, but at the time were devastating. You will create beautiful homes where everyone you meet will call you lucky because they didn’t see all the sacrifice, the tears and the lows. You will just about be used to enjoying life and your freshly finished home before you have to sell it to a complete stranger who gets to benefit from all your work, but will never ever know just how much you did.
But, there is also enormous satisfaction and a sense of achievement. You will create a bond with your partner like no other because you did it all together. You will also learn more about yourself, your limits, about life and self-sufficiency than most ever do. That determination to succeed, the reaching deep into your being to find the last vestiges of strength you possess, will spill into the rest of your world, creating more opportunities.
Then one day, a rather long time from now, you will pay that last monthly installment to the mortgage company and you will be set free. It changes everything. Somehow all the pulling down of lath and plaster ceilings by hand in below zero temperatures, the sanding of floors to the point you can no longer feel your fingers, the endless decorating at midnight, the crawling under the floor to try and find that leak, fighting for planning permission, discovering you have dry rot and crying into you cold tea, it will all be worth it. I promise.
But first, there are some tough questions to ask yourself before embarking on a life of serial renovation and you need to be honest. Here’s my ‘Reno Life Compatibility Questionnaire’, I’ve made it light-hearted, but with a serious edge. Let me know if you still want to pursue this life after completion of the quiz, and if you do, then I think we should be friends.
Read on to complete the questionnaire, hear more about the realities of renovation life and see the first home we ever worked on, including a floor plan. This is the first part of a series of posts, where I will be going through all of the homes we have remodeled since 1998, being brutally honest, and hopefully, imparting a little wisdom along the way.