Our Renovation Project – a Personal Experience

OK so how did this happen – its April 2008 and I’m standing in our renovation project, which is also our newhouse. It has four walls, not much in the way of floors and no roof and I’m watching the rain pour down the inside walls and onto my rather bemused head!

I remember thinking ‘What am I doing?’ Mr Woolwich has given us a mortgage on this property and we have more or less wrecked what was a perfectly good home - although we hadn’t considered it to be the perfect house before. It had felt all wrong but we had an image of what we thought it could be like. As the property sits on the banks of the Blackwater Estuary in rural Essex, we felt that it should be making more of the spectacular views and needed some modernisation.

The house was already upside down i.e. the bedrooms are on the ground floor and the living rooms on the first floor (to take advantage of the views) but we decided to go one step further and build into the loft to accommodate a further master bedroom and extend the living room on to the existing balcony area. Unfortunately the only way we could achieve this was to replace the roof trusses, which meant taking the whole roof off. As we weren’t living in the house during the renovation, the builder suggested we save the cost of scaffolding & tarpaulin (usually used to protect the property) and hope the weather was kind to us for the two days whilst the roof was removed and replaced with a new one.

Unfortunately the heavens opened and it wouldn’t stop raining. So this is when I found myself standing in a puddle of water in our alfresco kitchen, sharing my concerns as to what we had done with our builder. His response was ‘You can’t make an omelette without breaking the egg’. It made me feel better and proved to be the perfect response

Looking back now I don’t really remember all the hard work our renovation involved or the original house. In fact it seems like it has always been this way! Although I do remember the never ending important decisions we had to make, what colours, heights, materials, right down to the very fine details of exactly where every light, light switch and socket was going to be and crucial site meetings with the builders every morning.

I hope that your renovation or conversion project is a success and that you can enjoy it during and more importantly after completion and don’t forget you have to ‘break an egg to make an omelette’.

Ian Montague

Ian is Director of First Commercial Insurance Brokers Ltd and heads the Renovationplan Team.

Getting there. Note there were a few contractors on site that day!

Not yet waterproof