In which we realise that rose-tinted glasses are a real thing

It’s now February 2025, almost nine years after we moved in, and our olive oil still freezes in the winter.

Back then, I was vibrating with excitement over our imminent countryside adventure and Joe was quietly wondering if we’d lost our minds. He was excited, too, but he’s the sensible one. Which is a good thing, because one of us has to be. Both of us truly believed that by now, we’d have finished the house and would be onto Project Garden.

Narrator: laughs and laughs.

If you take nothing else away from this Substack adventure, please take this: no matter how optimistic you are, everything will take you MUCH longer than you think it will.

(Unless you have an unlimited budget and/or you make this your full-time occupation until you’re done, and/or you find a magic genie lamp, and even then you’re being optimistic because we all know genies are tricksy. Never trust a genie.)

I know that sounds obvious and I know Grand Designs and every home renovation show ever tells us that but let me tell you, WE NEVER BELIEVE IT UNTIL WE LIVE IT.

“Oh, but we’re different. We’re not like those flannels on the TV shows. We’ll do it properly.”

Ahahahahahahahaha.

As if those TV show people didn’t think exactly the same thing.

We are now nine years into our “five year” project and we laugh — oh, how we laugh — at our naive optimism.

Rose-tinted glasses are a real thing, friend-o. Our families were super supportive but I do remember one question: “Are you going to knock it down and build something new?”

I’m still horrified, because knocking down this beautiful cottage would have been a crime against everything, but looking back I can kind of see where the question came from.

Several times when we shared our progress with strangers and aquaintances, they’d ask us, “When are you moving in?”

We’d been there all along and it hadn’t occurred to us that might be a batshit thing to do.

I am still excited because we’re creating the home of our dreams — but I’m vibrating at a slighly lower frequency.

In limbo and not the fun party kind

We’re in limbo right now, because the last major thing we did to the cottage, we finished in early 2024 when we completed The Most Glorious Bathroom In The Land and thought we’d better calm down a bit and save up some more cash.

Now we’re waiting for detailed plans from our architects so we can get on with choosing builders and knocking down around a third of the building. Not the nice bit — only the damp, mouldy, depressing concrete lean-tos that currently house the “kitchen”, the inside-outside room1, a loo, and a shower room. Plus the stairs leading the first floor, which is going to make going to bed interesting.

So, here’s where we are so far.

Completed rooms

• The attic bedroom (although it’s going to be incomplete again this year because it’s involved in The Giant Extension)

• The Most Glorious Bathroom in the Land

• My cabin-slash-writing room

Now, this might not seem like much progress for nine years, but we need to keep reminding ourselves that we took off the entire front and side of the house, and removed all the floors, ceilings, and structural beams in the stone part of the house. So there is that.

That probably doesn’t make much sense, so I’ll start at the beginning and share photos of the house way back in the past, and before we moved in, and the floor plans. And explain them.

Floorplans

The room marked “living room” is the OG original building (the timber-framed part in the picture below): first course is stone, with a timber frame above, infilled with lathe and plaster originally (then replaced with brick and, in places, concrete — which is a heinous thing to do to an old building). This construction is is fairly typical for this part of Herefordshire.

The “dining room” is a Victorian extension built entirely of sandstone — not the nice, dressed kind, the prole kind. It’s beautiful but not fancy. It used to be the village shop and once had its own front door and a window on the first floor. The top window is no more, and the door is now a window. (On the right-hand side below.)

The “kitchen” is a 1940s (ish) concrete breeze block add-on that is damp and freezing cold (we weren’t kidding about the olive oil freezing in the winter) and it’s absolutely grim. It’s a one-person kitchen, and I still fight with myself for space whenever I’m in there.2

The rest of the “rooms” are higgledy-piggledy lean-tos added over the decades and are mostly leaky, cold, and grim.

We’re knocking the entire back of the house down — everything except the rooms marked “living room” and “dining room” on the plans — and replacing it with Kitchtopia — a huge kitchen, plus utility room and small cloakroom, with new stairs up to the first floor.

Above that, we’ll extend outwards to create two new bedrooms, one with an ensuite bathroom, for guests. Right now, it’s a one bedroom house. Sort of. By the end of this year, it’ll be a three-bedroom gorgeous cosy cottage.

Above that, we’re extending the attic bedroom to create a dressing room area and properly close it off so it’s private.

Take a look around

But maybe you want to see where this all started?

Lovely. Come with me as I guide you around the house…

Top to bottom, left to right:

1. The front of the house which looks like it was winking at us. One of the windows was removed at some point in the past. We’ve since reinstated it.

2. Huge inglenook fireplace in the main front room.

3. The Rayburn room (future library): this is in the Victorian stone part of the house, which used to be the shop.

4. The 0.5 person kitchen.

5. Downstairs loo, which used to be an outside loo before the space was “roofed” over.

6. The inside-outside room, which gets very wet in the rain.

7. One of the first-floor rooms, which is no longer there.

8. The attic. The look of horror on my mum’s face sums it up — but it’s stunning now and we sleep up there.

9. A view of the back of the cottage from the bank in the garden — you can see all the bits that have been glued on over the years.

From now on, you’ll be seeing progress room by room, and we’ll include videos where we can to give you a better idea of what we did and how it worked.

Part of the reason I’m creating this Substack now is to remind myself how far we’ve come and what a beautiful job we’re doing. Because we ARE doing a beautiful job.

It’s taking us much longer that it would take a professional or a rich person, but we’re loving almost every moment of it. Even when it feels like it’ll never end.

We hope you enjoy the journey with us!