They really loved asbestos in the 1960s, that hard wearing wonder material so resistant to heat and weather. Shame it’s so carcinogenic.
In our house there is asbestos in:
Most of this I could suit up and safely remove myself. But as it’s in the floor tile adehsive, that requires grinding off the concrete floor surface. So, nah.
Discovered a leak at the back of this cupboard, where the water supply enters the house.
It must’ve been leaking for … years, judging by the completely rotten pile of what used to be wood, crawling with woodlice, that was underneath.
[With thanks to At The Gates for the title inspiration.]
The house has no central heating, just a couple of electric storage heaters, and the cooker was a (very) old school electric affair with a coil ring hob. But it did have a gas supply, and a gas fire in the lounge.
So I’ve removed that, had the gas supply disconnected, and the gas meter gas been removed.
We’ll install central heating run by an efficient air source heat pump, powered by 1 part electricity and 2 parts renewable energy extracted from the outside air.
First jobs; thoroughly explore, remove carpets & soft furnishings, deep clean the grime, and wash the curtains we’re keeping.
Some pretty full on examples here:
This kids wallpaper must be from the residents before last, so from 1963-68:
Now this one we love!:
I also really like these kitchen floor tiles. But… (see a couple of posts later):
Our first Title Deeds from 1961 are for the plot, before the house was constructed, in ’63. Some of the neighbours have lived here since the estate was built and remember when beyond our terrace was a farm, where the primary school is now.
We’ve learnt that the estate was “designed by Keith Ingham of the Building Design Partnership, who is slightly more famous for the Brutalist masterpiece that is Preston Bus Station!”
Granada TV had close ties with the estate, so Michael Palin lived across the road, Joan Bakewell round the corner and, this neighbour told us, she’d regularly pass “that bloke who’d played Taggart”.
The blog post below shows original 60s features from another house on the estate, and even the original brochure!
We find this an interesting and useful reference. Our door handles for instance have been replaced with awful 1980s things; we can now look for second hand handles to reinstate the original style.
Norris Hill: The Green – manchester modernist society
Photo credits – black & white building photos: Royal Institute of British Architects
https://www.ribapix.com/Norris-Hill-Park-Stockport_RIBA75281
https://www.ribapix.com/Norris-Hill-Park-Stockport_RIBA75276
https://www.ribapix.com/Preston-Bus-Station-Lancashire_RIBA51110
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.
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:
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.”
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
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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