How To Design & Renovate Your Way Up The Housing Ladder - Part 2
The ‘need’ to climb not a ‘want’, plus the before & afters of our 2nd and 3rd homes with floor plans.
Welcome to HOME & HORT, a newsletter that celebrates interior design, gardening, vintage finds, life, culture, crafts & the seasons. You can expect expert tips & as many big dollops of joy as is humanly possible from me JP, a serial house renovator, garden makeover man and general lover of all things that make us giggle.
In the coming months and years I’ll be showing you everything I do to our 1500s barn and walled garden. But, not just the good stuff, this is the only place you’ll see what went wrong too. Come and join us!
This post has many photos so it might be a tad too long for Gmail. Check it out in the app or on the tinterweb.
A ‘Need’ To Climb The Housing Ladder, Not A ‘Want’
Over the past 27 years since we met, my husband and I have bought and sold many times, sometimes due to work location, other times just because it was time to move on, or because one of us, no names mentioned, couldn’t tear themselves away from Rightmove. It’s like powder blue satin to Madame de Pompadour for Christ’s sake, no hope!
We both had full time jobs, so property developing was never going to be a career. It was just something we ended up doing almost by accident in our spare time. We have never bought a property specifically to renovate and sell on, or flip, as it’s known. All our houses have either been our home or bought to rent out. We’ve nearly always lived in the properties we have remodelled during the build and renovation process. Renting elsewhere was a luxury and never cost effective.
In every instance we carefully planned our next steps. Before we had even put in an offer on a house we had downloaded the title plan from Land Registry to see what we would own. We worked up a few new floor plan layouts to see if they were worth extending and worth the bother. We were also able to discover information that we might have known about till much later during the buying process and that can be a very expensive mistake. You can also download the neighbours deeds and plans.
Did you know you can do this? The title plan and deeds of any home only costs £6 to download a copy, but make sure you go to the right website, there are many scams where they charge a lot more and they are the sponsored ones at the top of a google search. Always visit the government website, then click ‘search the register’.
We also have our own points system which we use to work out whether the property really fills the brief and whether it’s a head or heart decision. I’ll talk more about that in a later post.
We have always been intensely aware of our ‘need’ to climb the property ladder. Neither of us were born with a silver spoon. We both started our life here on this crazy planet in some form of social housing with parents that loved us. We have both been successful in our individual careers, but with the pension system the way it is now and with me being self-employed, its astonishing how much you need to save to have a good retirement. It has always been part of our plan to retire as early as possible and enjoy life to the full. The only way we were going to be able to even consider doing was to make extra money by renovating houses. It’s one of the best ways to better your life financially, but it’s hard graft, exhausting and very stressful.
We never ever started out thinking that we would spend the best part of 30 years doing DIY. So much of our life has been spent up ladders, plumbing toilets and scraping paint off staircases. When everyone we knew was having a lovely weekend in the garden with friends, we were covered in tile grout or had our hand down the toilet.
We didn’t really have an overall strategy though, other than we wanted to end up in a detached house for at least some of our life and that one day would live by the sea. I think that was enough, just having a dream at the end of it all, even if that dream changes. It’s what kept us going. So, the first thing I would say if you are planning on following in our footsteps is know what you want so you can keep your eye on the prize.