Our House - an Introduction

Can't be bothered reading this page ?

As most of you know, we've been doing up a house since April 1997, and lots of you have asked us to put some photos on this web page, so you can see what we've been up to. Well, here goes.

A bit of background to start with...

The house is in South Derbyshire, was built in 1910, and would formerly have housed quarry workers. The quarrying finished at the end of the '80s and the surrounding area is now given over largely to agriculture.

We heard about it from a colleague of John's who knew the people next door. We came to see it on January 3rd 1997 for the first time. It was dark and very very cold. We "viewed" the place with the man from the Council and his torch - there was no electricity at that time. We liked it!

The second time I saw the place, it was daylight, but so foggy that I had no idea what the surrounding area looked like! There could've been a factory right opposite and I wouldn't have seen it. Fortunately, there was just a bunch of fields, so that was alright! We still liked it!

So we bought it. And the third time I saw it was the day we turned up with the keys in April 1997. For the first ten minutes after we arrived, I truly thought we must've been insane to buy such a hole, but once we'd got stuck in doing some work, I soon came round to the idea again.

When we got the keys, the house had been empty for about 2 years, and had belonged to the Council before then. As you can imagine, it was not in the best condition, having played host to at least one squatter and a couple of vandals at some point in its recent past.

You'll see from the photos how it was when we got it. Bear in mind, there was no electricity for some months after we bought it - we managed with a generator for a while, and were very lucky to have understanding neighbours who didn't care if the generator was left running until past midnight. Without their support, this whole project would have been a lot more difficult.

We have taken literally hundreds of photos of the house, trying to keep a detailed record of how it was, of everything we've done, of how it is now. We've tried to select the photos that best show all of this. And there are lots, but you know what we're like!!

So here goes. . .