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URL: http://www.ianatkinson.net/photosets/renovation.htm
Date: 06 Sep 2010 23:41

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Renovation - Intro

In October 2005 I bought my first house. It took three whole months to get the purchase to go through and I finally got the keys in February 2006.

I had noticed of course that there was work to be done when I looked round the house but I really didn’t take in the full extent of it; I don’t know that anyone does really until they’ve got some experience of buying property!

Once I got in the house I realised very quickly that there was a lot to do. For a start the whole house was filthy dirty and it was obvious that a lot of it just wasn’t going to scrub up in any way. The house basically needed decorating from top to bottom.

There were also some structural problems so I had surveyors in to look do a timber and damp report, they found various problems including damp walls and woodworm that needed addressing. Part of the roof also needed repairing and all the guttering needed replacing.

What followed was a 10 month process during which I replaced every floor, painted every wall, every ceiling and every piece of woodwork, replaced every light, switch, socket and handle in the entire house…basically did it out from top to bottom!

The vast majority of the work was done by me, but there was also work done by builders, roofers, a heating engineer and various family members and friends.

I took lots of photos as I went along just for my own interest, seemed like a shame not to put them up! There are dates on them so people can see how it crawled along!

There are pages in the menu for each room I did with descriptions of what I did, if that’s all a bit boring there’s just an overview page too.