How We Climbed The Housing Ladder

And why I’m hoping we’ve stopped after becoming mortgage-free.

I did a series of posts five years ago on my old blog about how to climb the housing ladder. I say housing as I don’t much like the term ‘property’. It’s a word devoid of emotion and the stuff of life, like you’re buying a municipal car park or a disused bus shelter. Buying a home, for that’s what we’ve always done, is one of the most emotional and most expensive things you can put yourself through and making the decision to eventually sell your nest and move on to pastures new can be incredibly exciting, but also fraught with testing times. Do that ten times in a quarter of a century and it’s enough to make your head spin.

My husband and I never set out to become home renovators or developers. Indeed, 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.

I’ve promised you for a while now that I would revisit that series of posts on what to do and not do, particularly since we have now renovated another two houses and are starting on a third - our beloved barn. In the coming weeks I’ll be telling you everything I know and showing you what we did to each of the homes mentioned below. In this post you’ll see the homes as they looked when we bought them, so many of them don’t look particularly impressive. But, it’s amazing what a little imagination and a lot of hard work can do. It’s all coming up in the weeks ahead.

So, before I delve too deeply into what I’ve learned over the last 27 years of joyful serial renovating, I thought it might be fun to do a little list of of all the homes we have bought, sold or lived in since 1998.

---

This post is a free read, but my upcoming series on house renovations will be for paid members. I will be telling you everything I know about climbing the ladder by doing all the hard graft yourself. I’ll also be showing you all of the finished homes and explaining what we did to each.

---

You might need to read this in your web browser, or the app as there’s a lot of photos.

Home No.1

I wasn’t able to find a photo of the front of our first house anywhere. You couldn’t take photos on your phone back then, remember the Motorola flip phone? Loved that thing. God knows where our photo albums are either, still in a moving box no doubt. But, this is the house next door and all the houses on that street look the same, I screen-grabbed it from StreetView. Our home is behind all the shrubs on the right-hand side. I planted that deep burgundy smoke bush and all the other overgrown shrubs back in 1999. It was the start of my gardening journey and I had absolutely no clue. They could do with a good prune!

Our first home together after we met at the original G.A.Y club in London and fell in lurve in October 1998 was a mid-terraced 80s property in a small quiet cul-de-sac in Fulham, London, near the Munster Road. If I remember rightly, I think it was previously owned by a lady of the night, which thrilled me.

Truthfully, it wasn’t my cup of tea at all as it had no character, but we would set about creating charm and giving it a real identity both inside and in the small garden. What it did have was peace and tranquility in the city, which is such a special thing. It also had something rarer than hen’s teeth in London, its very own private parking space.

We sold in 2005 for double its value, although now it’s worth five times what we paid for it. In theory we could have just stayed here, not done any of the other houses and would be sitting pretty now, but we wouldn’t have had half as much fun and I wouldn’t be writing this for you now. I don’t have any regrets though. My life so far has been a rich tapestry of experiences all because of the house moves we made, the fun times we shared in them with friends and family and the lessons learned along the way.

House No.2

Dreadful image, I know. It’s from the folded up paper sales particulars I still have. At the same time as refurbishing the Fulham house, I also bought my own first house back in 2001 in Walthamstow, London. A double fronted Victorian house in total disrepair, but it appealed to my sense of symmetry and I adored those gorgeous arched windows. I’m a period home lover through and through.

I renovated this home in the evenings after work, which is bloody hard let me tell you. My day job was as a corporate PR in High Holborn. I’d leave as soon as I saw the boss go home and jump on the tube already tired to Walthamstow, east London. Still living in Fulham, west London, I would take the midnight tube train home every evening and be back on the train again for work by 7.30am. It was exhausting and my goodness, I wish I had that same energy now. I have so many stories to tell about these times and I’ll use this new series to tell them.

My husband, Mr C and I would work all weekend at the house too. We renovated everything ourselves, re-wiring, plumbing, fitting kitchens and bathrooms, sanding floors, decorating, gardening, the lot. What we didn’t know we learned how to do and that was well before YouTube, Jesus we were still on dial-up then. Remember that? It was the only way to keep the costs down though.

Home No.3

You’re going to have to forgive me with the photographs, this is from the sales brochure again, so glad I kept them. In 2004 we bought a dilapidated 1700s cottage in Northamptonshire. We spent a year renovating the existing building ourselves while we were still living in Fulham. We travelled up every weekend and did as much as we possibly could before heading back down to the Big Smoke for work on Monday morning. This house was the first one where we employed an architect and a builder to create a large extension at the back. The garden was unusual in that it was split in two. A path led from the first smaller garden to a huge open space with views for days.

I sold the Walthamstow house in 2004 and in January 2005 we completed on the sale of the Fulham home and moved to the countryside. Mr C had a new job and I had re-trained as a Vidal Sassoon hairdresser. Our new life was just about to begin. However, it was short lived. Never buy a house in the middle of nowhere on a dead end lane with very few neighbours. It turned out that we had some of the most homophobic people in England living on that lane. We couldn’t stay.

Temporary home No.4

No photo this time, it was only for a few weeks, but what an experience! In 2006 we sold the cottage. The valuations from the three estate agents were vastly different with one being over 100k higher. We went with the top one and got the asking price in a week. Always get at least three valuations!

We bought another house back in Guildford, Surrey, where I had gone to drama school many years earlier. But, we didn’t complete on the purchase at the same time as the sale, so we had to find somewhere to live short term. Everything was piled into storage in Northampton as Mr C and I drove down in two cars to Surrey with our few boxes of essentials, a duvet and our pet rabbit named Pie in tow.

We stayed in someone’s barn in the middle of the woods. When I say a barn I don’t mean a converted barn like we have now, I mean an actual farmer Joe, horse manure wafting, hay heaping barn. I could gaze upon a tractor whilst lying in bed. I’m pretty certain I could hear pigs in the room next door. It was a delight!

Home No.5

God I hated this house. It was everything I didn’t like about the ‘70s. I actually lost my memory slightly during this period and have no recollection of how we ended up buying it, other than I know I had absolutely nothing to do with it. We couldn’t find what we really wanted and so somehow Mr C was allowed free rein, something which has never been repeated.

It was the most soulless of renovations projects as we knew we wouldn’t stay that long. It hadn’t been touched since it was build and the previous owner, a Mrs Henderson, had died there. Every afternoon around 3pm a sulphurous stench would fill the air and on more than one occasion doors would slam of their own accord. Mr C never smelt a thing and he pooh poohed the slamming, but there was one time, we were away and I had asked my brother Simon whether he would pop in and feed Pie, the house rabbit. Later that afternoon I received a curt text from him asking why the hell I hadn’t mentioned that the house was haunted. He said there was a terrible smell and the doors kept slamming!

Home No.6

This home in The Surrey Hills became my little cottage of dreams and it’s where I really spread my wings in the garden and where we did our first major building work. It was also the house that was just a field away from where they filmed ‘The Holiday’ movie. You can read more about that here.

We bought this whilst still owning the haunted house and got it at a knock-down price. We weren’t married at the time and so each of us could own a home and not have to pay capital gains tax on the resale. In fact civil partnerships for gay couples had only been introduced in December 2005, full marriage rights didn’t arrive until 2014 in England, four years after our civil partnership.

I absolutely loved living on this street. We were attached to the most wonderful neighbours ever and are still friends now and at least three of my other neighbours are subscribers to HOME & HORT. I can’t wait to show you in my upcoming series what we did to this house and garden. We sold in 2013.

Home No.7

The proceeds from the sale of our last house allowed us to buy the one thing we had always wanted: a detached house with land. Believe it or not this is the ‘before’ photo of our weatherboard house. If you’re new here, then you can see the finished house in my weatherboard home series. This was our biggest project to date and actually I’m not sure we will ever surpass it, even though we have big plans for the barn. This, once it was finished, was and still is my dream house, the one that was completely perfect. Planning permission took an exhausting three years and the rebuild and renovations nearly two years. In September 2020, after the first national lockdown, we sold it in two days for over double what we bought it for. If you’d like to read the full story of why we sold my favourite house, then you can find that here.

Temporary home No.8

Not so temporary actually, ten months! We just couldn’t find what we wanted and the market was incredibly hot. Houses were going for way over the asking price and literally selling in minutes. I called this The Tiny Ugly Rental, the only saving grace were the Dahlias. It was diarrhoea brown and incredibly damp and mouldy, which we didn’t know when we signed the rental agreement. It was the least expensive home we could find to rent and it was in a prime location close to the beach in Emsworth, Hampshire. How we managed to fit all our belongings, still in boxes into this house I will never know.

It was here, only one month after moving house in October 2020, that our plan of downsizing and putting the rest of our hard-earned money in the bank changed forever. A deckhouse (photo below) came up for sale on the harbour. It would be too small for us to live in full time, but would make the perfect holiday home and an amazing business investment as a holiday let. It also fulfilled one of Mr C’s life-long dreams of owning a place right by the sea. We had to buy it outright as it was almost impossible to get a mortgage on it and we did it in a record-breaking three weeks! You can read all about that here.

It meant that our pot for buying our home was now smaller. During this time we nearly bought quite a few homes, one of which we came within two hours of exchange of contracts for, but were gazumped as the wretched liar of an estate agent had been running two couples against each other all the way to exchange.

Home No.9

The Harbour Deckhouse, as it became known, was renovated by us internally during the second UK lockdown. The exterior coverings were completely removed and replaced, along with the addition of a front balcony once trades were allowed to work in close proximity with us again the following March. You can read all about that here.

I now run it as a holiday home and airbnb and is available for rent this summer. Shameless plug there, but if you cant advertise on your own newsletter, then where can you? There’s also a lovely 15% off discount at the moment if you use code: SUMMER15 at checkout. To check availability just click here.

Home No.10

In February 2021, exasperated with the property market, a house appeared on Rightmove, a website I’m still obsessed with to this day, just outside the same village as our deckhouse that had great bones, but had been thoroughly neglected for years, to the point that the conservatory was falling to pieces and had panes of glass missing. The period features were second to none and I knew that we could make her shine again. I also knew that as much as we liked her, she would not be our forever home. She was way too big for us, but we would do our upmost to bring her back to life as quickly as possible and then sell her to someone that would love her forever. You can read more about that house here.

In spring of 2023 when the work at the Victorian house was almost complete, we saw a detached house much more in the centre of the village that had similarities to our New England style home in Surrey. It was a fixer-upper and needed a hell of a lot of work doing to it. We put in an offer and put our house on the market. But, a couple of weeks later, whilst on holiday, we had time to think. We were about to buy another house that would require huge amounts of cash to make right and we’d be back in the same position we were in before with a big mortgage and nothing in the bank. It was also in the same village as our deckhouse and I’d been wondering for some time why we wanted to live there. Surely it would be better to live in another town or village, so that every time we stayed at the deckhouse it felt like we were on holiday?

So, with a heavy heart, as I knew the house we had made an offer could have been my New England dream Mark II, we pulled out, but decided to keep our house on the market and look for something else. Enter The Barn.

Home No.11

Selling the Victorian house at the price we did meant that we could buy the barn outright. It also meant there was a bit of money in the bank for renovations. We’re right in the middle of a sleepy village, yet only five minutes drive from the city, with all its amenities and only a twenty minute drive to the deckhouse and the sea. The best of all worlds. We’re waiting on planning permission to transform this lovely old pile of bricks and flint, so for now, we are starting on the garden.

In the coming months and years I’ll be taking you all along with us as we transform our (hopefully) forever home. We both still have more energy than most to do all the things we do to create a home, but, we are not in our late 20s anymore. The bones are a bit stiffer and we ache so much more at the end of a hard day. This will be the one we stay in as long as the world keeps turning. I’ll never say never, things change and opportunities arise, but for now at least, we have no inclination to do it all again.

I’m so grateful to everyone who subscribes, both free and paid. Thank you. If you liked this post then PLEASE do leave a heart ♥️ and a comment if you want to, I’d love to hear from you. If you really want to make my day Restack it (that’s the recycle symbol below) as well. It’s so important and it only takes a moment. Thank you so much! Xx