More about houses

And on the subject of houses, a little information about the history of our current house in Joydens Wood.   As with our house in Henley Beach, Adelaide, South Australia, our current house needed extensive renovations when we purchased it in 1992.

Sadly for the previous owners, we bought the house from the bank, which had repossessed it, during the economic difficulties of the early 1990s.    The owner was so angry about the repossession, he wrote various swear words on the wall paper in the hallway, badly damaged the suspended ceilings in two of the bedrooms, and removed all the doors, the floor coverings and electrical fittings.    There were no light switches or power points anywhere in the house.   He also took out the new fireplace.    The kitchen was a mess. 

When I viewed the house, the bottom maisonette, it was boarded up, and secured with padlocks.   There was building rubble everywhere outside and the house smelled damp.  But the price was great, only £40,000, the location excellent and close to the entrance to the woods.   I knew that it was a solid house and would be easy to do up.    One gains much confidence after renovating a large house by the seaside.    I rang Walter, who was still in Australia, and he was keen to purchase it too, thank goodness.   Mortgages were very easy to obtain in 1992 as there were hundreds of houses for sale.

 And that was the beginning of a very long and exhausting process.    It generally takes months to buy or sell a house in Britain, due to a bureaucracy that is very slow.   But with our house it turned out to be very daunting.    We found out through our solicitor that the deeds to the house and grounds were not legal, and it was for this reason the bank could not sell the house.   I am not sure how the previous owners managed to get a mortgage, but from the mail that arrived on our doorstep, the man was indeed a very dodgy character.    To cut a very long story short, the bank agreed to pay the legal fees in order straighten out the deeds of the house.    Very fortunate.    When Walter arrived here he spent a considerable amount of time on the telephone, and driving between the bank and two sets of solicitors in order to move the process through faster.  

The photograph below was on the day we finally acquired the maisonette, with its overgrown and rubble strewn front garden.  

When we moved in, we found out that the elderly woman in the maisonette above us, had become a recluse after her husband died a few years previously.    In the three years she lived above us, we never spoke to her, and only caught glimpses of her face when she peered out of the window, usually behind a curtain.   All the information about the house came from her daughter, neighbours and the daughters of one of the tenants of our house.

The house was built in 1929 to accommodate the parents downstairs, and their daughter, husband and family upstairs.   The daughter still lived upstairs when we bought the bottom maisonette. The family also owned land around the house, which they sold off, with various encumbrances, much of which appeared to be handshake deals.     The front of the house faced onto woodland and some farm land, with a public footpath as a right of way.  There was no road.    The back of the property faced a lane, and the garage was sited on this lane.    

There were some interesting deals made when selling off the land around the house.   When the two houses on Summerhouse Drive were bombed during WW2, an agreement was made in that they would be built facing the public footpath, so that a road could be built, and the remainder of the land sold off.    The people in the new houses behind us were told that once the man upstairs died the houses that back onto the lane would no longer have access to it.   Our neighbours have talked about contesting this, but nothing has been done.   It all costs money.   I think that the lane originally led to a car yard and a small WW2 factory which assembled aeroplane parts.   The Woodland Trust have recently spent a considerable amount of money getting rid of all the cement sheets, which contained white asbestos.      Consequently our house and garden was a legal nightmare, in 1992.

  

A view of the house, taken on a grey day, not long after we bought it.   The so called unadopted gravel and potholed road, plus the asphalted public footpath is in front of the house.  No street lights on the road either.   

Thank goodness we had some help.    Tony organised for a digger to come in, and dug two enormous holes in the front lawn, which we filled with all the building rubble.    He then rebuilt the front fence and lay new paving slabs on the front steps and path beside the house.

Aaron standing beside the rubble, whilst thinking about the enormity of the job ahead of him.

A recent photo of the house, showing the new side retaining wall.   The old one was very strong, but leaned against a concrete panelled fence that previous neighbours had installed many years ago.

We have painted the walls of our maisonette in a bid to cover up the awful pebble dash, which was very popular in this country at one point.   Telephone poles are a feature on our road.  We replaced the old single glazed windows in about 2000. 

The front garden as it is now.   Who would know that underneath this lawn there are two enormous holes filled with rubble.

We inherited a presence, which disappeared when the woman upstairs moved out.    It was a comforting 'presence', a female I think, who kept an eye on me.    I never told Emma, who was an over imaginative teenager, about this ghostly presence as I thought it would spook her.    But this 'presence' once found my house keys, which had been missing for a few days, and looped them over my bag.  Of course there could be a logical explanation in that it was Aaron that had found them and left them there.   I prefer my story.

I often wondered who this 'presence' might have belonged to, and made up many stories.   But the one I like is that it belonged to a friendly tenant, who lived in our maisonette for about forty years.  The woman upstairs, was a real tartar, I believe, and no doubt my 'presence' thought I needed protection.

But back to our house, which was dark, gloomy and damp when we bought it.   The rooms had been recently wall papered, but ruined by the angry previous owner.   The house was completely bare inside.   At least we could see that there were no hidden problems.

During our twenty six years here, the inside has had many changes of wallpaper, paint and floor coverings.   The suspended ceilings in the bedrooms have been removed, and new soundproofing materials installed under plasterboard ceilings.

A photo of me, all ready for work, and wondering about the missing fireplace.   We bought a new fireplace from a local boot fair to put in its place.

The same photograph, with built in cupboards and a new fireplace and surrounds, alas not the one we bought from the boot fair.

There were no kitchen cupboards, just a few bits of board hanging from the wall.   I think the previous owner was in the process of putting in a new kitchen.    It had been a 1970s kitchen before that, we think

We bought cheap kitchen cupboards from the hardware store, which Walter and Tony installed, and twenty six years later they are still there, plus a few new additions    A couple of years ago we painted the laminated cupboard doors white, and put in new handles.   Instant transformation.

Our land at the back was only a few metres wide, and ended at the wall of the huge back garden.   We built a conservatory and paved the rest of it. 

And the small paved area above is now a small intimate area for outside dining, when the weather is warm.   It is quite a sheltered spot.

I know I criticised the original owners on their handshake deals, but I also saw a chance to gain some ground when our neighbours bought the maisonette upstairs, with a view to allocating some of the back garden to their garden.   They wanted to build an extension onto their house.

We reminded our neighbour that we had our names on the joint title to the back garden, although it officially belonged to the maisonette upstairs, and that he would have to get our permission to join some of the land onto his land.   This appeared to be a perfect opportunity to gain a back garden so we came to an agreement that suited us all.  We paid a solicitor to alter the house/land deeds so that we had the front half of the back garden, the maisonette upstairs had the back part, and our neighbour acquired the back garage and a slice of the side garden.    Perfect.   The neighbour even let me measure it out.

The man in the new house at the back also wanted the garage and a slice of the land, but we all said 'no'.  Apparently at one stage he tried to purchase the whole garden with a view to building a house there.   So there may be valid reasons why he is so unreasonable about access to the lane way.

Our neighbour, called Colin,  renovated the upstairs maisonette, which he rented out, and then sold to the present owner for a reasonable price in 1997.    Colin and his wife moved to somewhere close to his work, and the extension to their house was never completed.   I think Colin was a very considerate person. who we thought at first was a bit of a wheeler-dealer type.

There used to be a shed built into the wall, which had been filled in with soil, so we dug most of it out and built steps there.

At first the steps were really wonky but we paid an expert to redo the steps.    They are now steep but very sturdy.

A view of the back garden, which has also had many changes over the years.   The silver birch is self sown.

A view towards the garden at the back, which also shows how the neighbour's fence juts out into the original back garden. 

Our maisonette was not in the same league, renovation wise, as our Henley Beach property, but I think that we made a very comfortable home, out of a bit of a mess.    And it is a surprisingly large maisonette too, three large bedrooms, a hallway, lounge, bathroom and kitchen plus conservatory.   All with high ceilings.    Plus gardens at the front and back and access to the woods, a few metres along the road. 

We have loved living here, these past twenty six years.