Amy: Welcome to Stories from Site, the renovation podcast that digs a little deeper. I’m Amy Dohnalek and together with my co-host Jane Middlehurst we peek behind the curtains of those insta-worthy interiors to bring you the real processes people went through to make their dream homes a reality.

This week we speak to Camilla, whose renovation journey started during lockdown when she and her husband realized they needed more space for their growing family.

After an initial dream of finding a period property, they fell in love with the 1960s project, which needed a complete renovation.

We talked to her about envisioning her finished project and her process of project managing the works with her contractor to bring it to fruition.

So Camilla, great to have you with us today and I was wondering if we can start at the beginning of your renovation journey and maybe if you could talk to us about what prompted you to move and start this project?

Camilla: So probably like a lot of people, it was lockdown and being stuck in a small terraced house in London with a very small baby and a very small garden. And I think after that first 15, 16 weeks of very, very intense lockdown where my husband and I were both working from home. Our toddler’s, childminder had closed.

So we were trying to juggle all of that. My husband was also in the high risk group, so he was shielding and basically not going out the house, and we just realized how important having more space was going to be for us. I think also we both have jobs in London and had never had the opportunity to work from home more than say once a week.

So the liberation that, covid gave us proved to our industries that we could work really efficiently and effectively from home, actually made us realize we could leave London and the commute wasn’t gonna be such a barrier as it had been previously.

Amy: So what were you looking for? A place that had lots of space obviously, but I remember you saying that maybe your criteria changed quite quickly when you started looking.

Camilla: So I grew up in Tudor and Elizabethan houses. I grew up on the border of Essex and Suffolk, which is a real Constable country, beautiful architecture, very, very old. And so that was always on our kind of dream wishlist. And we started looking around quite a few houses and my husband’s six foot two.

And I’m, I’m quite tall as well. And we quickly realized how every room was sort of low and big beams that he was just gonna whack his head on constantly. And also really small, separate rooms. And actually we realized quite quickly that for the kind of life that we wanted, we wanted to be able to have that free flowing living, which we perhaps weren’t gonna get in a period property.

We came across this 1960s really, really ugly house which had great land and it was on the edge of a village, so we’d be able to walk to a pub and a shop. So we weren’t feeling completely isolated, particularly having come from London where we had everything on our doorstep. And we just kept seeing it on right move, but kind of kept ignoring it.

And we just randomly thought, let’s just go and see this really ugly 1960s house.

And that was partly inspired by a woman on Instagram who had just done up her. Really ugly, 1960s house and she’d put beautiful boarding on it and used loads of concrete and it just looked amazing.

So we walked into the house that we are now in. And the couple that were living there were in their seventies, eighties, and they were shielding, so they wouldn’t actually let us in the house. So we just walked around the garden and within three minutes I was in tears.

I was literally crying in the garden. I, I just knew this was gonna be our home and this was gonna be our project. And so we put an offer on the house without even going inside it. I also cried the day we moved in, sitting in this horrific sort of early nineties kitchen with green lino floor, which we later found out had asbestos in it and just sobbing and saying to my husband, what have we done?

This is so bad, but I don’t feel like that now, thankfully.

Amy: And did your husband, did he also kind of catch the vision immediately or did he take a bit more time?

Camilla: He took a little bit more time. So I was, you know, three o’clock in the morning pinning things on my Pinterest board, and then the next day I would take the best of the best and I would create mood boards for him to show him.

Right. This is what the outside could look like. This is what the inside flow could look like. This is what our kitchen could look like. Even to the point where I was having to sort of, I’m no graphic designer. I was having to sort of in PowerPoint, cut out a door from one place and cladding from another to put them together to show that it could look good.

And I think he probably put quite a lot of trust in, in me and this one Instagram account that I’d seen of this woman who’d done something similar. He’s a very visual person, so I had to show him things to prove that it would, it would work.

Amy: I’ve just got this really amazing picture of you kind of revealing your latest mood board.

Camilla: I lit, I literally would go A, B, or C. So because he also doesn’t, he has to ha, he has to feel like he’s part of the decision making process. So even though I knew we have to go for Route A, I had to like present him with various routes and make him slightly less attractive to make sure he I’m, but again, that’s, that’s just the industry I’m in.

You always have to show more than one option, even though there’s only ever one choice to go with.

Jane: I was just thinking that feeling of you arriving in the house as existing, it was just like you’ve been living in the mood board for so long and convincing yourself of this place that I guess it was a shock to arrive in the existing and was the upset, just realizing the task ahead?

Camilla: Yeah, it was really overwhelming and to be honest, we’ve lived with that pressure for a few years and, until we’d found an architect and then until particularly until we found a really good construction company. That pressure was it, you know, we’ve put all our savings into here and a horrifically big mortgage.

If this didn’t work out and it didn’t meet the vision that we had in our minds, we were just gonna be stuck with a really ugly house, you know?

Jane: The stakes were high.

Camilla: Yeah, stakes were high.

Jane: So tell us a little bit about that journey from arriving to, getting the project moving and, and how that happened.

Camilla: So originally we thought as soon as we had exchanged on the property, let’s just get going. But actually after a while, we decided that we wanted to live in it and really understand, what rooms we used the most and what frustrates us the most and what views are we enjoying or what views do we feel we are missing.

So we ended up having about a year and a half in the house just kind of enjoying it and getting used to the green lino floor in the, the 1990s kitchen and avocado, suites and that was a really good decision. Because we realized that some of the ideas that we perhaps had before we’d moved in weren’t actually how we were gonna end up using the property and using the space.

Were you the person sketching out ideas over your right move plans or had you engaged an architect by this point?

So we knew that the flow of the house wasn’t right, but neither of us could put our finger on why it wasn’t working. So we knew we needed an architect.

We, we looked at and met several but the person we chose we felt like she had done renovations of this age property before. And the output that she had created was modern, which is what we wanted. And she came around the space obviously, and we had a really good chat with her.

I shared all my mood boards with her and spent ages using words to describe how we wanted to feel when we walked in the house, as well as words to describe how we wanted it to be when we were socializing or how we wanted it to be when we were just with family.

So I think it was really important for her to sort of be brought in on the journey of how we live. So we did that and she instantly came back with a change, which was changing the position of the front door, which seems like a really small thing, but hadn’t crossed our mind whatsoever.

And that one change meant everything flowed better. And she just got it instantly. So there were a, there were a few changes back and forth, but very, very minor tweaks. But really what she came back with initially was pretty much what we went with.

Jane: Well, that’s really nice, like the unlocking of the space,

Camilla: and so once you had this plan in your hand, were you raring to go to get started? I, I assumed that the materials and the technical detailing were quite important to you. And how, how did that happen?

Yeah, we were really inspired by the materials within the village. So we live on the border of Essex and Suffolk a really, really pretty village. Loads of Flint in Suffolk and lots of black clad barns.

We wanted the house to sort of, blend into its more agricultural environment, and you walk along the fields, which you can get to from a gate at the bottom of the garden.

And this, you know, piles of flint where the farmers have dug it up. And very sadly, budgets meant that we couldn’t go with the flint because it was just so expensive. And the council actually refused our application to have black clad timber because they said that there was absolutely no existence of it,

in the area, and two doors down, there’s a house that is completely black clad, which just shows you how backward the planning process is. It was as if she’d never driven in the village whatsoever. And we’d put in the application all these other houses within a sort of 200 meter radius from us that had black cladding, but they wouldn’t accept it, which I think is a real shame.

But in retrospect, it saved us lots of money cause we weren’t having to either stain the wood or or burn it. But it’s not quite the aesthetic we were originally going for, but that’s just one of the compromises we had to make.

Jane: It’s really frustrating when you’ve got such a great vision and the planners for whatever reason, can’t see it.

Camilla: Yeah. Although it is interesting because the very, very first picture that I pinned on my very first board was a house that was bottom half black, painted top half silvered, untreated cladding, and I think it was probably my husband that went, oh, I think we should have black cladding, because it exists in the village and it’s a bit more barn-like.

And I really want Flint, which I totally bought in on, but I ironically, the house that we’ve ended up now looks exactly like the one that was the very first picture I pinned. So, you know, we are, we are very, very happy. There’s no complaining. And then your question about were you raring to go and, and just want to do it? Shortly after we got planning permission, I then found out I was pregnant. So that was a bit of a, hiccup that we hadn’t sort of really expected. I spent ages. And I mean, weeks writing our scope of work because our architect had got us through planning and had been clear that she didn’t want to be involved after that.

So I had to sort of learn through HomeNotes, thank goodness for HomeNotes, what needs to be included in a, in a tender process. And I also come from an industry where I have written scope of works and fee proposals and things like that. So I had a general sense of what needed to be included. I probably went a bit o t t on detail.

Everything from, I want a 1 meter 40 by 2 meter matting at the front door. I was very, very specific about everything which was one of my main frustrations that no one else had read the scope of work like I had. But it also meant that our um, cost estimate was probably really accurate because I’ve been so anally specific about everything we wanted.

Amy: That’s, incredible.

Jane: Yeah. How was that received? I’m interested to know, like for the different contractors who you sent that out to, what was their reaction to receiving the scope of works?

Camilla: So we sent out the tender to, six different builders. We were in this sort of halfway house where we were probably a bit too big for local builders, but probably a little bit too small for big contractors.

Our budget was about 200,000 a little bit more. So the local contractors received the scope of work and just went, Ugh, no, there, no, there’s this, this is, this is far too sort of, professional and on the face of it, complicated, so they all backed out. So then we ended up with two contractors who had availability and were willing to, to tender.

We ended up going with the building contractor that our architect had recommended and we felt safe going with them because she’d recommended them and had known them for a long time.

It gave us a, an initial foundation of trust that maybe we wouldn’t have had with another contractor who were completely unknown to us.

Amy: And so going into this, did you know that you were gonna have to project manage directly with the builder? And were you ready for that?

Camilla: Yeah, I knew that my husband and I would have to project manage it. Again, the industry that I’m in, I have to oversee quite complex creation of things. I work in advertising. I’ve made TV ads for years, big budget TV ads which is nothing like building a house, but at least the, the understanding of the need to communicate and find the way of efficiently and effectively communicating, and I think that was a really big learning for us. I come from an industry where everything’s done over email and even text message and phone is usually, not used as much and certainly not face-to-face anymore.

Whereas builders, I was sending long emails of things that we’d noticed on site that needed tweaking and I would just wouldn’t get any response. And actually I quickly realized that we needed to just go down there or pick up the phone and and chat to them. And the best time to do that was at about seven o’clock in the morning whilst they were traveling to site. So that it was fresh. And also they really respond to being fed. So I would often come down pretty much every week with donuts or a, a big bowl of fruit.

For Christmas, we gave every builder a bottle of whiskey to say thank you for the hard work. And actually, I think they were really taken aback I don’t think people often said to them, thank you. You really appreciate the hard work that you are doing.

Jane: It a big difference.

Camilla: it does.

Jane: Can I just ask, sorry. On a slightly technical thing, so you’ve got these drawings that were planning drawings and you’ve got a very detailed schedule of works, which is obviously a written document. There’s a bit of a gap there in terms of the kind of technical drawings where you draw out everything that you want to happen.

How did you bridge that gap, and how did you communicate to your contractors exactly what needed to happen?

Camilla: So we had a really good structural engineer and that helped a lot. And he wrote very, very detailed drawings for us. And he actually came back a couple of times when our builders had questions and just met directly with the builders.

So there were times where us and the site foreman, we just made decisions on site. So we would get the tape measure out. We would plunk a brick here, plunk a brick there to see how it felt, and we would just make a decision on dimensions and things like that, which maybe was a bit haphazard, but at the same time, trusting a drawing is not the same as being in the space and,

going, actually that wall doesn’t work there. It does need to be a foot further in so we’ve got more space on the other side, or whatever it is. So for us, having that flexibility worked, which is not gonna be right for everyone.

And I, when we were having those site meetings, I I had, I, I was the one who started writing notes, but I ended up getting Ben to write the notes cuz I was doing all the talking. And we still would have to email the summary of the items that we had discussed almost on a daily basis to cover our back.

And the days where we have forgotten to do that are even today biting us on the bum. So, f for instance, we’ve had under floor heating throughout the downstairs of the house, apart from in two rooms. My office and a sitting room, and I know we agreed to put the radiators in these two rooms on a separate system to the radiators upstairs so that I could have the radiator on in my office in the afternoon when it’s cold.

And because I didn’t put it in writing, I’ve got no proof that that was something that we agreed to do on site. And it’s only one little thing that I’ve failed to do, but the impact of me is that I’m having to sit here with an electric blanket on because it’s really cold because I can’t turn the heating on just in this room, cuz otherwise it’ll turn the heating on in the whole rest of the house.

Jane: That just shows how important those site meeting notes are.

I think the biggest learning from this is that there are always gonna be things that are gonna go wrong, and it’s not the things that you expect.

Camilla: It’ll be something completely different and you can’t let that wind you up. It’s just part of the process, and you’ve gotta try and enjoy the process of what it is you are creating something new that you are shaping and having a lasting impact on the future.

I think we were really lucky that our builders were incredible. They were really, really good. And the number of times I would come on site and say to our, foreman, oh, I’ve noticed this, this, and this. And he would say, don’t worry, I’m already on it.

And I talked to the guys about it yesterday and I had every confidence that he was spotting little things that, that we hadn’t. So having that trust in that one person for us was key in delivering the project smoothly.

Amy: Yeah. And can I ask you, when you say you have to enjoy the process, do you feel like you succeeded in in doing that?

Camilla: I enjoyed the process. I think my husband wouldn’t agree. He, he would get very wound up, which is funny cuz there’s always this sort of saying that he’s far more laid back than me. But when it got to something as big and as stressful as this, for some reason I was far more relaxed. I think I just always had faith in the process and that it was, it was gonna happen.

And what would be would be, I think you do need someone. To be the calm one and someone to be the one to put hot rod under them. It, it did work having that kind of good cop, bad cop.

Jane: And were you good cop? Just to be clear in this.

Camilla: Well, I guess it depends. I mean, it

depends how

Amy: cookies and stuff, but you would definitely

Camilla: was bringing the cookies and I, they, everyone onsite knew that the final decision was with, with me.

And that’s only cause I’m so, got really good attention to detail, which my husband doesn’t. He’s a, he’s a big thinker. He would have the awkward discussions. So if I had questioned something and the builders had kind of, gone, “no, no. don’t worry about it,” but I knew deep down it wasn’t right and I wasn’t being listened to.

I’m afraid I did get the man to try and sort it out. I have to say these last nine months, I have not experienced as much sexism as I have. I have, I’ve had electricians phone, my husband instead of me, despite the fact I’m the one who has sent the email about with the question, they’ve, I’ve just been ignored and they’ve gone to him and he’s answered the phone and gone, I haven’t got a clue.

Talk to my wife. She’s the one who contacted you. She’s the one who’s got the detail.

Amy: It’s still definitely rife in the industry and I think yeah, we’ve definitely experienced it as female architects which we don’t talk about it very often, but it’s, it’s definitely prevalent.

Jane: Yeah, well, It kind of changes the way that you act on site.

And I think it’s only recently that I’ve really realized that we have to approach things in a very, subservient way, which is upsetting sometimes that you kind of feel like you have to work around egos. And make sure that you’re not coming across aggressive or that, you know, you’re not trying to play that you know better.

Camilla: And the moment my husband would arrive on site, they’d all be going, all right, la all right, boy. And I ended up having to say to him, listen, when you go down on site and you get all like, all right mate, how you doing? I instantly feel out of the group. And I instantly feel like I’m not part of the process.

And he actually was great and was like, I hear you, I recognize that I’m, you know, I’m really sorry. And he, he, you know, didn’t happen again. But it, it, it was amazing. And he was doing that to get the best out of them in the, in the way that he knew, right? So it, it wasn’t him sort of being consciously sexist, but that was the result of it.

And I was having all of these conversations with a 5, 6, 7 week old baby strap to me. So I was walking around site going, that wall should not be there. You’ve put that in the wrong place with a baby strapped to me. And you could see them kind of going, this woman should not be on site. But that was the only way I was gonna get, you know, things done.

Amy: Yeah.

Camilla: And I couldn’t leave the baby on my own, on her own. So, you know.

Amy: And you were living with your in-laws, was that right? Or your parents?

Camilla: So we moved out when,

our baby was five weeks old and it was also the first week of summer holidays, so school for our eldest had stopped. So we spent the summer basically sofa surfing across various family members who lived in Norfolk and lived in Devon.

We then from September when school started and when work really started to ramp up at the house, we decided to rent an Airbnb in a, an next door village. But they had various prior bookings, so you know, every few weeks we had to pack up the whole

thing and move to my parents’ house for like four or five days.

So we were literally living out of a suitcase with two children, one of whom was a newborn for five months, which was very, very stressful.

Amy: Yeah.

Camilla: We couldn’t live on site and we couldn’t afford to pay rent for somewhere consistently for five, six months. We managed to find a building contractor who was willing to do it within five months, the other contractors were coming back and they’d said 10, 11 months. And we couldn’t actually find anywhere to rent for that sort of short period of time either. So, so suitcases and sofa surfing, it was.

Jane: And did they manage it in the five months?

Camilla: They got the bulk of it done within five months. We were late moving back in by about a month and a half I think, and there was no floor, there was no toilet downstairs, but there was enough for us to get by and then they finished it when we were living here. Which the moment we moved in, everything slowed down and ground to a halt.

Amy: And it was almost like the first 90% of the job took 50% of the time. And then the last 10% of the job has taken the other 50% of the time, which has been so frustrating. It’s so common. I mean, we see it all the time, don’t we, Jane? I mean, and you feel like of course they can work around you, but I think just mentally it’s like, oh, it’s done. You know? Even if, even if they know it’s not done. it

Camilla: It’s like that, that deadline somehow switches to never ending. You know, there isn’t a fixed point at which you’re saying we need this finished by anymore, which is just like ASAP obviously. Yeah, so we moved in in November So yeah, we’re, we’re looking at like, what, four months since we moved in.

I mean it, that’s pretty much, okay. Maybe not 50 50, but it’s, it’s 60 40 in terms of timings.

Amy: If you could go back and redo any part, is there anything that jumps out at you that you think, oh, I would’ve done that differently?

Camilla: There’s definitely design choices that we’ve made that I regret, but I don’t regret the process. And I think we were really, really lucky with our architect’s vision and the builders that we found. We really trusted them. And I think if you haven’t got that trust with the builder, it would’ve been a very, very different, very painful and probably quite upsetting process. We really trusted them to get the job done. We were discussing it ahead of this podcast of, you know, what things would we have changed and we know exactly what we would’ve changed. But we both said, well, we’ll do that next time.

So this definitely hasn’t scarred us enough. To not do this again. I almost feel like this was maybe our, our practice, but who knows?

Jane: And how is it now being in your space and, you know, thinking back to those Pinterest boards

Camilla: It’s so worth it. I come downstairs cuz we’ve only, we’ve only really done the downstairs. We’ve done the bathrooms upstairs, but the upstairs is still very much firmly stuck in the 1960s. So I walked downstairs in the morning and I, I honestly feel like I’m living in my dream home. I just had,I didn’t really realize that I would feel like this, that it would actually look like my Pinterest board and look like the vision that was in my head.

And it’s just wonderful. It’s really, really wonderful.

Amy: Oh, well done. I think part of that success is to your skillset and just enabling you to get that vision made. I mean, yeah, kudos to you.

Camilla: Who, who knows. But, it’s, it is just brilliant. I, I love the fact that. No one else will notice the things that excite me as well, like this little bit of cornering on our kitchen and how the, the edge I’ve measured meticulously the edge of one of our kitchen units. So I knew it would slot right next to the framing around the door, and I haven’t lost a single millimeter of, of storage space.

You know, tiny little things like that that no one else would notice, but that make me quietly happy.

Jane: That’s brilliant. getting every ounce out of the project is really an amazing feeling.

Camilla: If you’d like to see Camilla’s 1960s Village dream then head over to our [email protected]/storiesfromsite where we have photos of the finished project.

Amy: As we’re coming to the end of this series, we also wanted to let you know that we’ll be running our very popular guided version of our Getting Started Course in September to help you make a plan for your project.

What does that mean? Rather than doing our course on your own over several live sessions, we take a group of you through the course content together so that you can ask us questions, meet other home renovators and share experiences, as well as get the motivation and accountability to make a plan for your works and get your projects finally started.

We love doing these live sessions and throw lots of extra content and support in there so that you can get the very most outta the course.

So if that sounds good to you, then sign up to the wait list in the show notes below, and you’ll get notified when tickets go on sale later this summer.

That’s all from us for now. Join us next week where we’ll be reviewing this series and discussing our favorite takeaways and top tips. See you then.