When we last visited the story of our house, we had just uncovered soft, wet, mouldy floorboards in the dining room. Remember?



I cannot begin to tell you how utterly sick I felt when I saw this. From the day we walked into the house, I felt horribly overwhelmed. I like to be in control of my situation, and I like to feel like I know at least enough to get by about whatever it is I'm doing. What did I know about houses?! Nothing. Especially not when houses go bad. All I could think was 'this is going to cost more money than I'll ever have in my whole life'. We uncovered this problem on a Sunday, there was nothing we could do. Except probably cry a bit. The house has made me cry so often that its barely even worth noting!

In our survey, damp had been detected in various parts of the house. A national timber and damp-proofing company were recommended as the next point of contact. They offered a free survey. Great! I thought. Lets get them in to see what the damage is. We'd found some woodworm upstairs in the second bedroom when the carpets were up. Although Im not much of a woodworm expert, it looked old to me. Some timbers had been replaced in the second bedroom when the fireplace had been taken out, and these newer timbers were absolutely clear of woodworm holes, so I assumed that whatever had been living in the timbers wasn't living there any longer. But still, the company could take a look at that, too.

Out came someone who poked the walls with meters and bit and peered at the squishy green floorboards. At one point it was wet rot, then it was dry rot. More or less the entire ground floor of the house was deemed to be damp and in need of treatment in the walls. The national company (no naming and shaming, but their name is the same as a well known manufacturer of kitchen gadgets, such as a K-Mix...) said they wanted to send in someone else to have a closer look another day. Out came another fella who lifted a couple of the nasty floorboards, had a peer about, then put them back. After a day or two, we received our report. With a quote. For fifteen thousand pounds. My Much Beloved turned a curious shade of grey. I laughed. Because, when faced with a quote for fifteen thousand pounds when you are literally down to pennies in your bank account, what else can you do except laugh?

The quote was, well, it was quite something. It suggested concreting the entire ground floor, damp proofing every single ground floor wall, including all party walls and internal walls, and treating everywhere for woodworm. But, what did we know? Nothing!

We approached another company for another quote, but it was quite conflicting, although cheaper. In the end, after me googling frantically (and finding that quite a lot of people had had similar quote experiences from this major company) and wondering if there was any way we could just stick the laminate flooring back down, do a bit of painting and sell it on very, very fast, we opted for a better solution.

We paid for an independent timber and damp expert to come out to the house and produce a specialist report. It cost around £200, but in the long run, saved us somewhere in the region of £11K, so was worth every single penny! Our damp surveyor, Jason, doesn't work for anyone except himself. So, he told us what was really wrong with the house and what recommended fixes would be. It was then down to us to get quotes, but we could get quotes based on our report. He said he is often instructed to survey a house when a damp company such as the national company that came out refuse to do work under a guarantee, he will come out and prove that a treatment has ben ineffective which will make them come out to fix it for free. It sounded like people asked him to do that a lot.

Jason's report said we had damp problems in a lot of areas of the ground floor, and at the back of the house this was due to two things: 1) our house sits slightly below ground level, as you can see when you stand in the kitchen and look out into the garden 2) the joists in the dining room were sitting on the earth, there was no gap to allow air to circulate and therefore, moisture was soaking straight into them and this had encouraged dry rot. At the front of the house, it was likely due to the bay window being rotten, encouraging penetrating damp, the front door being useless and leaking into the chimney. When I showed him the quote we'd had, he said that what had been proposed was a fix, but it was like using a wrecking ball to hammer a nail into a wall.

Armed with this report, we felt a bit less terrified. A close friend had said that whenever she's needed work doing on her flat, she's used My Builder to get tradesmen. Having used the site to find a plumber to sort our boiler and our bathroom, we put an advert out with the details of our damp report. And, thankfully, we managed to get a great timber and damp-proofing specialist out to fix our problems for less than a third of the cost of the original survey.

If I can teach you anything from this, it would be that there is no such thing as a free survey. Our independent report was woth every penny we paid, and left us confident in what they problems were and what to look for in the treatment of them. We then lucked out with a great contractor to fix the problems for us. Our contractor really helped me get over how bad I thought the issue was. He understood why I was freaking out but promptly told me that it wasn't a patch on some of the places he's been and some of the work he's had to do. he pointed out that our joists looked original and whilst the floor had collapsed in a big heap, the joists hadn't (although they were wet and needed cutting back and replacing). He pointed out that the house had been standing for over a hundred years and hadn't fallen down, so it wasn't likely to now.

Next time, I'll share some more of the damp-proofing process!

Over the last 16 months, if I had a pound for every time someone saw our house, or heard about what we've been doing and went 'oh, didn't you get a survey done?' I would have been rich enough to pay for someone else to take over absolutely every part of the work on our house. I don't know why people think this is a helpful thing to say. Here is a pictureless, wordy post where I attempt to explain surveys and what happened with our. So, hopefully, nobody will ask me this ridiculous question ever again. (Short answer is yes, of course we got a survey. The most expensive kind. But the surveyor wasn't a clairvoyant.)

When I left university, I took a lovely job as an administrator at a Chartered Surveyors office in my hometown in Scotland. These surveyors went out to properties and completed surveys and mortgage valuations for purchasers and lenders. The system is/was very slightly different in Scotland, or at least, what the surveys were called was different (I think it has all changed now in Scotland, and a vendor needs to provide a report when the house goes on the market, should I ever move back to Scotland, I'll have to investigate what its like not). Anyway, in my day, there was a Scheme 1 Survey, which was a straightforward mortgage valuation, quick look around, 3-4 page report, lots of standard phrases and paragraphs, valuation for mortgage purposes and rebuild purposes at the end. Boom. A Scheme 2 was a lengthier report, lots of info, plenty of pictures (which were never fun to insert into the template survey without ruining the layout of the report, as an aside!) 10-12 page report which we would staple into a fancy cover. It included the valuations as well. You can also get specialist and structural surveys, but the office I worked in didn't do those surveys. Im so glad I worked there, I learned a lot about how surveyors work and what phrases to worry about in surveys and what to stay calm about.

In England, the survey structures are loosely the same, mortgage valuation, Home Buyer's Report and then a Building Survey are available, along with specialist damp and structual surveys. We went for a building survey as the house was old and shabby looking. We also had to pay our lender to get a mortgage valuation done, which was a stinger, but the lender wanted their own surveyor out, so we sucked it up.

The thing about surveys, however, is this. No matter how much money you spend, no matter how great and experienced your surveyor is, he or she will never find everything. They don't lift carpets, they definitely dont lift up laminate flooring, they don't shift a whacking great welsh dresser to see what the vendor might be hiding behind it, they dont drill into walls, they can't see through plasterboard to see what's underneath, they don't get up a ladder to check out your chimney. There will be caveats about this in each and every survey they complete. They will miss things because there is no choice but to miss things. Unless you are sending them into a vacant property with no carpets, no wallpaper, no furniture, no anything, they will miss things because there is simply no possible way to see everything in a house.

Could we have complained to our surveyor about missing some of the major issues in our house? Perhaps, but its not likely to have gotten us anywhere. Our surveyor found damp in various parts of the house, but was not a damp expert so could only tell us where it was, not why or whether the treatment would cost loads of money - totally standard. Where the surveyor found damp, there was damp. The surveyor would never have found the dry rot we subsequently had 'diagnosed' in the floor timbers and joists, nor would he ever have known the issue is caused by us having no space between the joists and the sub-floor, so damp was drawn up through all the wood till the wood couldn't take any more and the boards fell apart. The surveyor did miss a large crack in the kitchen which, it turned out, was caused by a highly insufficient lintel in the kitchen which probably would have come crashing down in the end (don't worry! We've fixed it now). But to be honest, I missed the crack on my two viewings of the house had I paid attention to it, I would have asked the surveyor his opinion of it. All the surveyor would have said, upon reflection, was that it was worth getting a specialist to check it. A survey will tell you what, if any, problems there are that can be seen. Beyond that, its down to you to get more surveys or more experts in to tell you more about the issues and what can be done about them.

I'm not put off by our experience, we've just been unlucky. Pretty much every hidden problem a house could have, we've had it. It didnt occur to me that the pitfalls of buying a shabby house in need of work might be that people had neglected it so deeply that it carried major problems. Next time around, I'll be more prepared for that, I'll know what I want to look at closely at a viewing and I'll know what I want my surveyor to look at specifically.

Its been a long time. So much has changed in my house since I last posted. Im still trying to keep things in a vague chronological order. Instagram has many, many spoilers of where we are at currently, though!

Today I wanted to talk about scope creep. I spent a year or so working with a business change team made up of project managers and programme managers and the like. A lovely bunch of folk. And one of the things I learned was, when you undertake any change, you need to define the scope of your change project first and stick to it, like glue otherwise you will fall victim to scope creep and you suddenly end up having to change the whole world. Unfortunately, this is clearly not a skill I developed personally from my time there. Perhaps I should have asked one of my lovely colleagues to help me plan all this house stuff out! My house could probably be some case study for project managers in training of just how bad scope creep can be. Seriously, PRINCE2 trainers, get in touch and I'll talk you through it and you can laugh and laugh and laugh and build it into your training courses. You're welcome!


In my last post I said that the plan back in May 2015 was to change the system boiler for a combi boiler. This would let us put in a new bathroom with a shower - once we got the big water tank out of the small bathroom, there would be space to put a shower in. Once these two things were done, we'd move in and put up with everything else and sort it when we could. We were never supposed to paint the house or rip the carpets up but that became essential to making the house feel clean, as cleaning didn't cut it. The downstairs had laminate flooring in the front room and dining room. I really don't like laminate floors. Maybe because my only experience has been in rented houses where it'll be the cheapest flooring imagineable, but its just not for me. I'm a carpets kind of girl. We all have our differences! We reasoned that we'd keep the laminate for the time being at first. We'd noticed that an area of the dining room floor right by the back door was springy when we walked on it. I wondered if maybe there was a hole in the floorboard. We decided we'd take the laminate up.

We took the laminate up in the front room first and were really pleasantly surprise by what we found. The boards were in good shape, someone had sanded and stained them at some point and they looked reasomably good. Hurrah!




The next day, we took up the laminate in the dining room. Sadly, our luck ran out in there. That springy bit of floor turned out to be a huge damp patch in the floor, with a hole in the floorboards where they had just rotted through. There were two patches like this, one by the door and one near the entrance to the kitchen, where we had recently put a giant american style fridge freezer when we pulled it out of the kitchen to give us more space to clean in there. Eeeek! The smell of damp was pretty much awful and I remember being terrified - this looked really major and this was not something my trusty cleaning products or massive tub of magnolia could fix.





We'd found some woodworm upstairs on a couple of floorboards and after some bad rainfall the area below the front window, above the window seat developed wet patches on the walls. The inside of the window seat smelled damp too.

Its not really a spoiler to tell you that the central heating and bathroom refurb were then joined by timber and damp-proofing works. From there, it snowballed. We then ended up doing (deep breath!): structural works in the kitchen and putting a whole new set of units in, boarded the dining room ceiling and had the whole room re-skimmed, fixed damaged chimney pots and replaced all the soffits, fascias and guttering, fitted a new back door along with kitchen and bathroom windows, replaced all the doors upstairs with new architrave and new skirtings in the hallway and fitted new carpets to the whole of the upstairs. And it didn't end there, either!

Whilst everyone else gorged on Easter eggs and roast dinners, we spent Easter Weekend cleaning. Armed with Zolflora, sugar soap, Fairy liquid and my personal favourite de-greaser, Vanish Oxy Action, we cleaned everything. We went through about 3 pairs of rubber gloves each and countless black bags. The house smelled horrible, all full of smoke and like nobody cared about it. Walls,skirting boards,ceilings were scrubbed to within an inch of their lives. We hand picked muck off the carpets,then hoovered like mad. In the end,we ripped all the carpet up and taking it to the dump was the most satisfying thing in the world.

...it's a very good place to start, apparently. I wasn't sure I'd ever make this blog post but being honest, my reader numbers are low anyway and one day, in the very distant future, I will be able to look back on this without shuddering, crying, or being overcome with The Rage, and in these troubled times where we are spending money like its going out of fashion and feeling like nothing's changed, its important for me to remember where we came from. Here's our house story. Warning: contains graphic images of a filthy house.