Renovating a house: Why you can do more than you think

Monday 05 August 2024

In May 2021, my wife and I made the beautiful, daring, and excruciating decision to not only buy a house, but renovate one.

Had we renovated a house before? Of course not.

Did we know what we were getting into? Not in the slightest.

Would I do it again? Without a shadow of a doubt.

Our home is a former hay barn. The fourth piece of a larger complex that was split up over time and sold off. The barmy story I was told is that an alcoholic sailor needed to pay for his whiskey habit and deconstructed his farmhouse, selling off outhouses and closing off wings, a story which I continue to tell even if it isn’t true.

Which I really hope it is. 

Pictured: Much of our work involved pulling down a wall only to find a new surprise. 

The hay barn sits separate from the rest of the property and is attached by one granite wall. From what I can tell it has been renovated multiple times, each decade seeing a new owner put a different stamp on the building. Much of our work involved pulling down a wall only to find a new surprise, a complicated, time-consuming addition that was completely unexpected. A broken boiler, a pointless void, an imposing and immoveable piece of granite. In fact, it was tiles upon tiles in the kitchen. Some were white, some were patterned. This was a house that had been torn apart and put together multiple times, and we were only the latest in a long line of people who wanted to build their own image of a home.

So, where to begin? Pinterest, apparently.

I’ve come to learn that when it comes to renovations, I can be pretty laser-focused. I’m no good at planning, or at least I wasn’t, and I don’t really have an eye for ‘design’. I need a task and to get on with it. My wife on the other hand is an excellent planner and has a clear eye for design. While the house is truly a joint venture, the aesthetic is almost entirely down to her.

So ‘we’ planned. ‘We’ built Pinterest boards for the kitchen, the bathroom, the bedrooms, and we chipped away, room by room. And here’s the rub, we did it almost entirely on our own. 

Much is made of the difficulty in Guernsey of getting tradespeople through the door. We were naive at the beginning, and while we weren’t rich, we had some money aside to get people in to do the jobs we thought we couldn't do. But I soon learned that – apparently - there’s so much work in Guernsey that no one needed us. Messages would go unanswered, promised quotes became elusive, and we found out the hard way that if we wanted to do anything, we’d have to do most of it ourselves. Things went better when we didn’t have to wait on anyone else.

This isn’t a dig at the skilled people of Guernsey. We did in fact, by hook and by crook, manage to get a hold of several people who, over the last few years, have been essential in getting our home up to scratch. But finding them wasn’t easy. We called in favours, we begged, we shifted schedules to allow people in at the weirdest times of day. 

Pictured: We did a lot of the work ourselves. 

I became a plumber; my wife became a plasterer. We ended up saving thousands, and my one take away has been... you can do more than you think you can. 

On a scale of hanging a picture to ‘Grand Designs’ our renovation was a little less than ‘Amanda and Alan’s Italian Job’. Not all the walls came down, but some of them did. 

Some highlights...

A lot of time was spent pondering the chimney breast and why it seemed smaller in the spare room than it did the lounge below. We’d bought the house hoping that we’d be able to install a woodburner and also assumed that simply pulling out the fake electric fire and getting it lined would be the end of the story. No such thing. 

It was fake. Breeze blocks built up to look like a chimney breast. My Dad and I had to bring it all down and start again. While doing so we found an old flue in the attic, suggesting that there had once been a woodburner, or someone had begun fitting one and then just given up. Just one of the many mysteries we came across.

The bathroom was a quote/unquote nightmare. 

Hanging a mirror that was also plugged into the wall had us questioning not only why we were doing this, but what was the point in anything. A low point triggered by something as inconsequential as hanging something, but something entirely understandable to anyone who has ever tried to hang anything awkward. The plumbing was tricky, and I had to learn to join copper pipes without them weeping. Something I failed at multiple times until we eventually gave up and called on a family friend to come fit our shower unit. 

But, to give myself a little credit, I learned from my mistakes and successfully plumbed our bathroom sink and kitchen. 

Pictured: Renovating the bathroom was a "nightmare".

In an unpredictable moment of decision making I came home to find my wife had pulled up all our kitchen lino, deciding that the tiles underneath would be better. While discovering the existence of tiles had been exciting, the amount of hardened glue that we now had to chip off was something I’ve never really gotten over. 

I electrocuted myself on the extractor fan. My wife scratched her retina with PVC while re-roofing the conservatory, leading to a frantic trip to A&E. 

We plastered some of our own walls. We painted all of them. We built shelves, wardrobes, kitchen units... We repaved the garden; tiled and fitted a new utility room. I’ve forgotten how many tonne bags I heaved down to the side of the road. New lights, new switches, new door handles. 

We had help from friends who gave their time to drag secondhand woodburners up steep steps and help fit new radiators. I spent an entire day in the attic, bent double like Gollum, while sweating so much I could barely see. We were put up for weeks on end by family whose patience we probably tested as we waited for bathrooms to be completed, or dishwashers to be plumbed in. We spent late, late nights, covered in dust, cursing the day we decided to pull down that wall, or tear up that piece of floorboard. 

And while getting in tradespeople wasn’t easy, we did get some help along the way. Auburn Gardens provided their truck to move our fake chimney breast, Guernsey Electricity came to fix an emergency leak, InsideOut plastered our walls and offered advice. A friend gave up his evenings to sort out our electrics (something I will not try and do, after both electrocuting myself and linking the TV up to the light switch) and we had some professional old boys come and sort out the second hand woodburner.

And talk about second hand... my wife populated this cobbled together, eccentric build with repurposed gold from across the island. A Persian rug recently biffed out of a house in Fort George, most of our furniture, the patio slabs, the discount bathroom tiles. We have a beautiful traditional oven salvaged from a kitchen refit. Our bedroom wardrobe was carted from Jerbourg to Bordeaux in our campervan. 

This house is now filled with stories, heart, and warmth. The garden isn’t finished and I still have to put up some shelves in the kitchen, but we made it. We know every inch of this house now. From the brand-new boiler with a price tag that made me sick, to the downpipe that no longer drips. 

It all seemed so daunting four years ago, but I’ve learned that you can surprise yourself with the things you can do. 

This article first appeared in CONNECT, Express' sister publication. 

The latest edition of CONNECT can be read HERE.