Ten years ago I bought my first ever home, a tiny one-bedroom cottage in the most idyllic part of North Dorset. From a mile away it looked like the perfect ‘play school’ home, you know the one I mean, white painted render on the outside, front door in the middle of the house with two sash windows downs stairs and two upstairs and a simple slate pitched roof with chimneys at either end gently billowing smoke over the Vale, perfect. Well, not really.The closer you got to the house the worse it was. The white painted render was a mess. It hadn’t been maintained properly for years and was literally falling off the wall. Rainwater had gone through the render, through the brickwork wall and had destroyed all of the internal plaster. What looked like beautiful timber sash windows were actually white plastic windows that were fully sealed units and didn’t allow any ventilation into the house making the damp even worse. The previous owners were really proud of these UPVC windows because they cost thousands of pounds and had a 20-year guarantee. Big deal, they were the wrong choice of window and wrecked the house.
The damp had then got into all of the internal structural timbers creating wet rot everywhere so walking on the timber floors was like walking on sponge. The original natural slate roof tiles had been removed in the early 1990’s and replaced with ugly, fake concrete tiles that were 3 times heavier than slate and caused the wet rot infested timber roof to sag and bow. If all that weren’t enough they also built a cheap and ugly, lean-to extension to the rear of the house that had no insulation anywhere and a wrinkly tin roof. In the summer we felt like oven-roasted chickens unable to breath and in the winter we were as cold as penguins in the Antarctic.
As I walked around with the estate agent I couldn’t stop myself saying ‘Why? Why? Why?. Why would anyone do such a thing?’ This once beautiful cottage that had been built perfectly well over 150 years ago had been ruined by naïve home improvements carried out in the last 10 years. For me, one of the problems is the phrase itself; ‘home improvements’. Just because you are spending your hard earned money on ‘new work’ to your house doesn’t automatically make it an ‘improvement’.
If your builder is cheap but compromises on good building practices, if your new window supplier doesn’t fully understand how old buildings live and breathe, if your roofer tells you to ‘strip off those old natural tiles and go for some man-made concrete ones that will last you forever’ without understanding the structure of your roof or if you are simply terrible at DIY then please don’t bother doing anything. What you are doing is not ‘home improvement’ its ‘home destruction’ and you will have completely wasted your money.
You might ask why the hell I bought the place then. Well, its location was perfect, it was all I could afford, and I love projects where I can add value. We lived in it for 2 years (god knows how!) and I tried everything to save the building, but when the roof, the floors and all the supporting brick walls we ruined we had to say goodbye to 150 years of history. We demolished it and it broke my heart.
For any ‘home improvement’ please get a good builder. Look for good value and don’t always go for the cheapest. The cheapest work will often costs your more in the end. If you aren’t any good at DIY then pay someone else to do it.
If you want to learn how to build and save money on the job then offer to become a labourer to someone who knows what they are doing. For extra technical help you could consult with your local authority building control officer who can also advise you on the best building practices and if you are doing substantial home improvements then employ the services of a good architect.
If you get home improvements right you are prolonging the building’s life, adding value and increasing it’s overall quality. If you get improvements wrong you can literally destroy the building and if that’s what you’re interested in doing then do yourself and your home a favour; save your money and get a job in demolition.
