Tuesday April 26, 2005

Owning a Victorian house

After owning two modern houses, when we moved to Oxford we ended up living on a road called Magdalen Road in East Oxford. I think we paid 80K GBP for it or thereabouts. This was at the height of the 1980's housing boom. The survey was reasonable and the words I read in it seemed to assure us all was well. However very soon we realised the house needed a lot of TLC. The thing about these houses is they look ok until you try and do something. Take the spare room. We decided to decorate it. First thing remove the wallpaper. Hang on the plaster comes off too. Time to replaster the room. Plaster dust gets everywhere. The window. Sash windows . Very nice to look at and I soon learned how to take them apart, strip the paintwork and rehang the sash weights on the cord. I found painting the window with Sadolin was best. This preserves the wood as it seeps into the grain and to give it another coat you just paint that on top. As this stuff is thin you don't have the problem of windows getting stuck and not opening. Of course while the window was in bits I had to board it up. When I did the front bay window for the living room sashes the boarded up window looked like we had squaters !

The central heating installation and bathroom refit were reasonably painless but the roof replacement was a real mess. I remember trying to open the loft landing hatch afterwards. It felt stuck. I gave it a good shove and a ton of slate dust landed on the carpet. We replaced all the doors with stripped pine ones which was easy.

When we did up the rear garden there was a concrete path to remove. We had no path by the side of house being a terrace so the whole lot had to be carted through the house to a skip on the road. The turf went through the house on a return leg.

All this sounds very negative but we enjoyed that house. The best room was the dining room. We installed a new fireplace with victorian tiles. It was a lovely room as the window looked out over to the nearby church. When we came to sell up and move to Twyford I think we got 75K for it. We had put a lot of initial equity into it so we were still solvent (others were not so lucky at this time) and because of its condition it sold quickly.

I think owing a house like this is a once in a lifetime experience. Only once.