Renovation, Renovation

One of my life dreams has always been to renovate my own property. This passion was put on hold for many years while I lived overseas in rented accommodation. When I returned to the UK I decided the time was right to renovation my Victorian house in Wimbledon which I bought in 2019. I planned to do this while running my own interior design company and helping clients with their own property transformations.

Over the coming 12 months, I have decided to share my renovation experience, the good, the bad and the ugly (stresses). I do hope you will follow me on my journey and will share some of your own stories too.

So here goes.......

This is my beautiful but tired looking Victorian terraced house. When I bought it I knew it needed some TLC, but I still loved it because I knew how wonderful it could eventually look.

It's a three bedroom one bathroom property. The inside is well built, has retained many original features but over the years has been confused by the addition of some 70s and 80s decoration ie the kitchen and the bathroom.

Before Renovation

So stage one of my journey was to hire an architect and work with them to redesign the layout of the house so that it allowed for all the comforts of modern living while retaining its original character. I knew that this was going to be my forever home so decided the final layout would suit how I wanted to live rather than focus on "re-sale" value. Finalising the drawings has been a painstaking process (sorry architects - you've been very patient with me!) and obtaining planning permission has taken considerably longer than expected. So one year after starting this process I am now just waiting for Thames Water and third party wall approvals before I'm ready to start with the build.

The design I decided to go for that would meet my lifestyle was a full downstairs L shaped extension - because I love to cook so this had to be the heart of the house, plus a loft conversion that would become a whole floor bedroom, bathroom and dressing room suite.

FIRST LESSON LEARNT - every part of the building design process takes a lot longer to finalise than you think it will and almost always requires an expert opinion which involves additional costs.

Stage two of my journey was to hire a builder. Fortunately, because I'm in the interior design business I work with builders and tradesmen all the time so I knew immediately who I trusted would deliver the expertise and attention to detail and quality I was looking for. My advice to anyone who is new to this would be to spend as much time as possible researching the best builder in your area by obtaining referrals, or by asking to see previous work (ie go round and meet their clients) this is an important step as you want to avoid any re-work once the build has been completed.

So as of today, I have my drawings, my engineers calculations and my builder. It's early days and until the third party wall agreements come through I'm limited about what I can do, therefore, so far all we have done is start some initial demolition which began last week (see pictures below).

Watch this space over the coming months for further updates.