Where it all began

Good evening you beautiful people! I thought I’d start my first blog with an overview of our new home, and the journey we took to get here.

On my 22^nd birthday in March 2014, we went for tea and cake in Durham from where we lived just outside of Newcastle. I’ve always been hugely interested in property and architecture, and love visiting new places (especially tucked away villages or hamlets off the beaten track.) After our tea, I suggested to John, my now husband, that we go for a drive to do just that, and see what’s around as we didn’t know Durham well at all. We ended up coming across a three-storey Victorian terrace for sale, and so we knocked on the door and asked the owner if she could tell us a little bit about the area. Now I kid you not, we really had little to no ways or means to buy a house; we were not in the slightest bit ready and were both on very low incomes on our first jobs fresh out of university: me as an estate agent and John as a call centre agent. We were currently renting a tiny new-build flat just outside of Newcastle which had mould growing out of its mould. 

So this knocking on the door business was really just a bold move by me, a dreamer, thinking ‘ahh imagine if we could buy this absolutely gorgeous house with so much character, which is way too big for us?!’ Reader: we did indeed buy this absolutely gorgeous house with so much character, which was definitely way too big for us. We fell in love with it: it had high skirting boards, decorative cornicing, an original stained glass window, original fires and huge, spacious rooms and it was on the market for £150,000. So fast forward 3 months, with a sizeable mortgage which we still can’t believe the bank trusted us with, we managed to move in in June 2014. 

We didn’t do a lot to the house. We couldn’t afford to. I trained to be a teacher whilst at this house, and received a £400 monthly bursary whilst studying, which didn’t even cover the mortgage, but at least it was a help. So yeah, times were tough, but we looked after the house, did a lot of painting of rooms and John and his dad DIYed some wainscoting for the hallway. We sold it after 4 years for an almost £40,000 profit. 

Thankfully, this gave us the equity to buy a bigger house in a much better area. Also, by this point, I was a full-time English teacher and John had worked his way up into the law sector. We found a 3 bedroom barn conversion just outside of Richmond in North Yorkshire, and after a lot of toing and froing with the developer (who decided to renege on our agreement after we’d paid a holding deposit), it became ours without ever hitting the open market in January 2019. This was a lot of luck and fortune playing into our hands here, because this was a great investment in terms of value growth. However, I did also scour Rightmove and other property selling websites multiple times a day, and proactively contacted local agents to be sent properties before they went online which all contributed to us finding the barn. The barn was beautiful in an idyllic location overlooking fields and the river, and we thought it would be our forever home. 

However, you never can tell what’s going to happen in the future, can you? Our 2020 wedding was cancelled due to Covid, and I got pregnant with Everly, and so these respectively led to John working from home full-time and in need of an office, and toys taking over the entire house, and us wanting a playroom. And so in 2023 we started looking for a new house. 

This time, we wanted something very different. We wanted a project, a house with character and in need of some love. We made a list of ‘non-negotiables’, because it’s easy to get sucked into somewhere pretty, even if it doesn’t fit the bill, and then also a list of ‘desirables’, because why wouldn’t you try and get somewhere that is almost perfect for you? When I was an estate agent, I would tell clients that if you can find a house that’s about 90% of the way there for you, you can compromise and usually be happy without that last 10%. Maybe the 10% comes from you yourselves, living there and making it your family home. We’d also made a list of ’40 things to do before we’re 40′, and ‘buy a Georgian fixer-upper’ was on there, but we always thought that would be out reach.

But we put our barn conversion on the market, and it was crazy – we sold within 2 weeks and made 50% equity on our purchase price. This then meant we could hopefully get somewhere that ticked off that non-negotiable checklist; somewhere that gave us that 90%.

And then we found our Georgian farmhouse. It was listed on Rightmove and I thought, no way is that still available! But I called the agent, and it was, so I arranged a viewing. I remember how I felt when we drove up the looooong driveway to view it for the first time: I couldn’t actually believe we could buy this, and it could be ours. We viewed it first on a winter evening, and with the lights gleaming through the windows as we approached, we both fell in love. Also, we viewed a lot of houses. And I mean A LOT. And Everly would cry at every single one for some reason. But not this one. She seemed to love the Georgian farmhouse. 

Now we know the house had (has) issues. It had damp, some not-so-great plumbing and wiring, and hadn’t been updated since the early 2000s. But that was what we were looking for. It was perfect. And so we put an offer in… and waited. Almost a week later, they’d agreed and accepted our offer. We were buying our dream house! We knew it was going to be a big project that needed a lot of time, skill, effort and money (not that we possessed all of these things), but we were so excited!

Our first ever renovation journey was about to begin, and I’m so grateful and humbled to be able to share it with you guys.