There was a pretty white house I walked past every day on my way to and from primary school. As I got older, I’d see the house from the station platform on my way to and from high school. That station platform’s the place I met a boy who’d become my husband about a million years later.
That house is one I recall from childhood and by a stroke of luck, at the exact point in time we were on the lookout for our forever home, the previous owners of 30 years, decided to sell.
After months of disappointment while scouring property sites, there she was. Station Farm Cottage. A pretty white house we both knew and both found intriguing. And now, that pretty white house is almost ours.
Contracts exchanged, completion coming soon. We get the keys in the coming days and our adventure begins.
Built in 1884 (we believe), she began her life as a farmhouse. Her land was sold to developers when she was around 90 years old. Not long afterwards, she found herself surrounded by new build homes.
She’s now in need of a bit (a lot) of TLC, and we can’t wait to get started.
It’s been a while since I’ve blogged. In the weeks since my last post, the world has turned on its head and we’re all in lockdown.
We keep counting our lucky stars that we completed before that began. It did mean our plans drastically changed, and we moved in weeks sooner than we expected to. Original intention was to get some of the bigger, filthier jobs done first. But, with the need for self isolation and no opportunity to hire tradies for anything other than essential work, we had to bite the bullet and move in.
Some of the jobs we were supposed to do before we lived here included:
Replacing the boiler, fixing the radiators and installing radiators to the utility, annexe and downstairs bathroom.
Stripping out the 137m2 asbestos based artex and replastering the walls and ceilings.
Repairing the shrunken roof timbers.
Repairing the sagging ceiling in the master bedroom.
Sorting out the damp issues along the living room and kitchen outer wall.
There’s still plenty we can get on with, although we are finding we have to leave some jobs we thought we could get done during lockdown. For example, it became all too clear that the wallpaper in the office is what’s holding the plaster in place. So, we’ll leave it where it is until we know we can get a plasterer in. But, every beam in the house was painted black gloss. Stripping all that away to let the oak breathe will keep me entertained for some time… Don’t need a tradie to do that, just a lot of patience!
Estate Agent’s pic of the room we’ll use as our office / library. The ceiling’s crumbling asbestos artex, and the walls are held together by the paper.
The heating issues turned out to be our biggest immediate challenge. The central heating system is so knackered that only two radiators work. We know that flushing it will get the radiators back online, but we suspect that the ageing pipes and prehistoric boiler won’t cope with that sort of pressure and we’ll end up causing more problems. Either leakage or a completely buggered boiler meaning we lose hot water too, is not an ideal outcome. Thankfully the weather’s improved, and we assume/hope lockdown won’t carry on until next winter because working from home in a bitterly cold house isn’t much fun. I’ve lost count of the times I draped myself over the Aga between meetings…
Estate Agent’s pic of the kitchen. The good: Aga, parquet, and beamed hatch to the lounge. The bad: damp along the far wall, past their prime kitchen cabinets, asbestos artex ceiling, and the plumbing.
We’ve taken the opportunity to clear the overgrown garden. With no tips open, we’ve had to pause that now, until we can dispose of the green waste mountain. But we’ve started on the veggie patch and worked out that the rotten shed we were going to demolish will actually be brilliant, repurposed and refurbished into a chook run.
We thought those patio slabs were grey. Then we jetwashed them. The shed, as it stands right now. In a few weeks, that’ll look completely different and become home to two or three hens.
We’ve painted the lounge. We needed a space in good enough condition to retreat to. The lounge is one of the worst asbestos offenders with all walls and the ceiling containing the stuff. Before we moved in, we decided we’d get the whole lot stripped out, but knew a lick of paint would be enough to freshen it up and tide us over.
Estate Agent’s pic of the lounge. What you can’t see clearly is the original, huge, spectacular log burner, or the texture of the plaster on the walls.
Painting it made us realise we actually love the plaster texture of the walls. The ceiling still has to be dealt with, but we now know we’ll do whatever it takes to keep those walls. Asbestos in the artex plaster or not, they really suit the room, and according to the Asbestos Management Register we had carried out before we bought the house, they are safe enough to keep. So there’s the first silver lining of moving in before work began!
The lounge after a lick of paint with log burner on display, wall texture and kitchen hatch (former window or door?) more obvious, and our furniture in place. Windows to either side of the fireplace look directly into the next door neighbour’s garden. I’m fitting shutters for their privacy and ours.
The damp challenge is an interesting one. Since moving in we’ve begun stripping the woodchip out of the annexe and discovered damp along the back wall there, too. I’m not a fan of chemical damp treatments. Something about drilling holes in the walls and filling them full of silicone doesn’t sit right with me. Damp issues are generally caused by lack of air circulation thanks to stuff piled up against the outer wall, or slabs or tarmac laid up to it. Or, it’s faulty guttering or pipes causing water to pool.
Estate Agent’s pic of the annexe. Originally a workshop, it was converted in (we think) the 1970’s and joined to the house by a really strange utility space. None of this space is plumbed for heating. The huge bookcase display at the end was concealing the damp areas we’ve discovered as we began stripping woodchip.
Both of the walls affected by damp have huge conifer trees butting into them, or very large shrubs in very raised garden beds. Both walls, unfortunately, are boundary walls with neighbouring properties. So, once lockdown is over, another interesting challenge is for us to go and talk to those neighbours about clearing some of what’s in their gardens which is affecting the inside of our home.
Lockdown is providing us with a super opportunity to understand the house better before we take any drastic action. Whilst frustrating to begin with, we’re realising how beneficial that actually is.
We didn’t take this house on with the intention of renovating it quickly. To begin with, we don’t have instantly available finances to do that and we don’t believe in taking out massive loans or doing things on credit. For us, this is the last house we’ll buy. It’s our forever home. It’s our lifelong project. For me, it marked the twentieth time I’ve moved house in my life, and that includes a move from the UK to Western Australia, from WA to Victoria, then from VIC back to the UK. Enough’s enough. I’m never moving again.
We (hopefully!) have years to restore this house, a few weeks or months on pause isn’t too great an issue.
The past two days started out so well. We spent most of yesterday in the cottage, exploring, scrubbing, painting one of the not-so-bad rooms, and trying to work out what all the keys are for.
Off we went again this morning and carried on. We took a call mid afternoon from Andy’s lovely mum, taking the weekend from a real high to a dreadful low.
We’ve lived with Andy’s mum since moving out of our old place late last year, as we waited for the cottage. Our two cats, two turtles and two dogs of course came with us.
Bit of background… I lived for donkeys years in Australia and moved back to the UK a couple of years ago. It’s been a bit of a rough time for me, not as easy as I’d expected it would be to settle back in. Andy’s been my rock. And so too, were my two cats and two dogs, all of whom came back with me from Australia.
Handsome Coop Dog. He barks with an Aussie accent.
All four were rescues. Cooper the small yellow dog from West Australia; my darling little Chinese Crested dog Daisy from Melbourne; Kitty the Persian cat from Melbourne; and Fifi the ragdoll from Sale in Gippsland.
We call her Shitty Kitty.
The house we were living in, wasn’t much fun for them. A three storey modern townhouse with paper thin walls, tiny garden, and not much room. I loathed it, Andy put up with it, and they all made do.
Fifi. She’s a nerd. Just like her mum.
The cats and dogs are our family. We both wanted to create a home they could enjoy as much as we could. It took a long time to find the right place. Then several months to agree a deal. One month after we’d agreed a price, we lost my dear Daisy.
Daisy and I, hanging out down under. For many years, she was my world.
I was heartbroken. She was my shadow for a decade. Daisy was three years old when she came to me. She’d had a tough start to life, growing up with a dreadful backyard breeder, caged alone, used as stock. Coming to me changed her life, and she changed mine. I adored that tiny girl. Losing her was impossibly hard to get over.
Coop Dog was my first dog. Found as a stray in the Perth suburbs at a couple of months old, I adopted him at 16 weeks, when he weighed about the same as a big bag of sugar. He’s a fabulous little man. A gentle and loving personality, little dog bark, and oh so funny. Diagnosed with chronic pancreatitis at seven, a heart murmur a couple of years later, and the onset of liver disease last year; that he’s happy and loving life at 14 years old is nothing short of a miracle.
Desperately sad that Daisy would never get to see the cottage, it’s been even more important we move in as quickly as we can so that Cooper gets to live out the rest of his life in our forever home. Today’s phone call was Andy’s mum, letting us know that he really didn’t seem well. I came home immediately. Within half an hour, Andy and I were at the vets with the wee man, whose breath was fast and shallow.
The poor boy’s on a drip, with intravenous pain relief and antibiotics. We don’t yet know if he’ll make it. All we do know, is that he didn’t seem ready to go yet, and so we shall do everything we can to help him try to stay.
What began as a wonderful weekend, turned quickly to a tremendously tough one. All we can do now is wait, and hope he makes it. We know how much he will love the cottage.
We first viewed the cottage in May last year. After a second viewing in early June, we knew we wanted it. Thanks to some extraordinarily unhelpful selling agents who didn’t seem that interested that we wanted to buy the place (no one else was – there’s a lot of work), it was four months before we could.
Then, there was the long, unexpectedly painful and drawn out purchase period. In all that time, we hadn’t been back to look round.
Whilst we hadn’t forgotten the feeling of being inside the cottage, it had faded. I won’t lie, there’s been a certain level of fear and worry as we’ve read the various reports from our building surveyors, asbestos testers, builders and roofers, timber and damp specialists, and so on.
Whenever we needed to remember why we were doing this, we’d go for a drive past. For eight months, we’ve popped round the corner and looked at it from the outside. Andy’s been reinvigorated by the excitement of taking a power washer to the outside (simple things!) and tidying up the garden.
My head’s run wild with ideas for the inside and I’ve had to refrain from picking up supplies, knowing that over time, what I remembered the cottage interiors were like, were being distorted by fading memories and the estate agent’s somewhat deceptive wide angle photos.
So, after navigating the multitude of keys to work out which one opened the door, and with a fair bit of trepidation, in we went.
Almost immediately, in the first room we entered, I tried to start lifting the old carpets to finally discover what lies beneath. Andy had to drag me away to continue the tour.
The living room is far bigger than we expected, as is the kitchen. The dining room made us laugh, the curious utility area is twice the size we thought it was. The cellar is as fabulous as we remembered. There’s a strange smell to the place, the sort that means every window will be wide open today.
So many things we’d forgotten, not realised, or simply hadn’t spotted.
Today’s a day of discovery.
Notebook, pen, toolbox and cleaning products are ready to go. Today we’ll work out exactly what we need to achieve before we can move in.
We haven’t quite got the keys to the kingdom (we think we should get them in the next few days), but we’re already acquiring some of the bits and bobs we know we’ll need.
The way I roll, is to spend as long as is needed finding everything for each room before starting work on that room. We’re bargain hunters, antique shop, reclamation yard and online marketplace junkies. It’s fabulous fun spending as long as it takes hunting for the perfect pieces.
Growing up, I loved visiting my Great Auntie Joan’s house. Her home was was an early 19th century end terrace, built by her father as the family home. The bathroom was tiled in jade green and black vitrolite. And it was glorious.
Vitrolite is (in my opinion) simply the loveliest thing you can put on a bathroom wall. I’ve always remembered Auntie Joan’s bathroom fondly, and have long thought how wonderful it would be to tile a bathroom of our own with that wonderful glass.
Yes, Station Farm is Victorian. Yes. Vitrolite is Art Deco. No, it’s not the right period.
But, the angle I bring to a renovation, is that what you put in, shouldn’t have to be all in keeping with the period of the property. That said, I can’t stand renovations which destroy all period character, filling the home full of glistening modern elements.
For me, it’s about hunting down pieces the same age as the house or younger. Making each room feel appropriate to an era through which the house has existed. Thankfully, Andy agrees. Or, possibly, thinks it’s easier to just let me get on with it…..!
So, for years I’ve been banging on about a vitrolite bathroom. We finally (almost) have a house where it’ll fit perfectly. The hardest part is actually finding some vitrolite.
It’s a brittle glass, incredibly difficult to remove for reclamation without damaging it. That means it tends to achieve fairly high prices, especially the sought after jade green. The quantities I’ve stumbled across over the past couple of years have been financially out of reach.
Imagine my delight when I stumbled across an auction listing for a vitrolite splashback and tiles, enough for a small bathroom. It’s yellow, and perfect for one of the spaces in Station Farm.
That’s the downstairs bathroom walls sorted, then.
I’m Katy, one of the custodians of the cottage. The other one’s Andy, my other half. Station Farm’s our happy place. It’s our sanctuary. Home to our menagerie, our random collections of stuff, and and our crazy hobbies.
We met within full view of the cottage. We were over the road on the train station platform, about a squillion years ago, on our way home from high school. We were chums, then went our separate ways. Twenty odd years later, we reconnected from opposite sides of the planet.
We were engaged in Jordan, hitched in Vegas. We lived in Australia before we settled in the UK and bought the house which had watched us meet all those years ago.
So, what’s the point of this blog? Why did we decide to create our own little home on the web?
We’ve a long renovation ahead of us. This seems like a lovely way to document all that we do.
We’re forever excited when we find bits and pieces from junkyards, antique shops and online marketplaces. This seems like a good place to gloat about the good stuff we get – or ask for help finding the good stuff we need!
By sharing our renovation journey, we might find other folk with sensitive period home renovation in mind.
We don’t expect our renovation to be over in anything less than many years. We’re not modernising, and we’re not filling the place full of tat from chain stores.
Where original features were removed, we’ll replace them. Where previous renovations have added asbestos artex, rooms not up to building code, and interesting fireplaces, we’ll peel back the layers and put back the period.
It’s not an overnight job, and especially not on a budget.
Station Farm Cottage 