So the house looked OK in the brochure, right?

And you expect it to look nicer in the brochure.

But in this case the state was much worse than it appeared. The house has had very little done to it since it was built in 1963, which is in some ways both good and bad. We love the aesthetics of this estate, and in this house most of the original features have been preserved (unlike many neighbouring properties).

The kitchen and bathroom fittings are original, so very outdated, but the joinery is decent, so we should be able to reuse a couple of units. The bath & sink have been painted though (?!).

But the thing that’s harder to capture (fortunately for you, dear reader) is the grime. A layer of.  Even operating a light switch felt grim.  And the stench throughout.

Photo Captions on a small screen

btw, we’ve noticed that when viewing this blog on a small screen, the photo gallery hides the captions.  So to get the full story, tap (i) to reveal the captions:

2022 to Summer 2024

We came to house buying with an open mind about estate agents, as the local estate agent we used in Hull was excellent.

After browsing properties on RightMove we quickly realised Julian Wadden were particularly blatant liars. They list end terrace houses as semi-detached (including this one) and elsewhere a tram stop described as 10 minutes walk was actually 25 minutes away. This is beyond mere exaggeration.

The listing for our new house is here & below. (The photos look greyed out now, but you can still click them to view clearly.)

In this description, “Additional selling feature include: Upvc double glazed windows” turns out to mean mostly single glazed – only 2 windows have been double glazed. All the upstairs windows and the patio doors are still the originals.

But our favourite line has got to be, “Southwest facing, the rear gardens catch the glorious afternoon sunshine all day long.”

August 2024

We bought a house!

It took a while, ‘cos the housing market in south Manchester is pretty broken, so we had to consider a wide range of options.

Not really.

I mean, we have bought a house, and it does need work. But not that much.

The house pictured above is round the corner from where we currently live in Withington. It hasn’t changed in the last 6 months.

If renovating our own house gets to feel a bit much at times, or gets overwhelming, I’ll consider the state of this house, to help keep things in perspective.

Next post – the house we have bought: The Estate Agent Brochure

August 2024

Here we go again! We’ve bought an end terrace in Heaton Norris, Stockport, part of the south Manchester conurbation. It’s rather to different to our last house in Hull. It needs work. Quite a lot of work. It’s had very little done to it since it was built around 1963 – still with the original kitchen, bathroom and upstairs single glazing. And no central heating. It gets an Energy Performance rating of 51, a low E.

But this means great potential for improvement and decent retrofit, by for example leap frogging a gas boiler, straight to a heat pump, whilst preserving the mid century style.

Maybe when we’re done I’ll do a proper write up all about it, but in the meantime (some) family and friends keep asking for photos, so I’m adding this quick blog.

And if you’re really keen, you can Subscribe to get an email when I post.

To read on, there’s a link to the next post (New House – Needs Work) in the bottom right
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