Amy: Welcome to Stories from Site, the podcast for renovation enthusiasts. I’m Amy Dohnalek and together with my co host Jane Middlehurst, we chat with home renovators about the roller coaster that is renovation.

In this episode, Lydia returns to stories from site to share the exciting updates in her renovation journey.

Following the extension and renovation of their one bed flat into a two bed flat, Lydia and her partner seized an unexpected opportunity to buy the flat upstairs.

Lydia shares the challenges and triumphs of transforming the space on a very tight budget in a whirlwind three week renovation with support from friends and family.

Now a landlord to friends Adam and Rebecca, Lydia reflects on the intricate balance of thorough planning and adaptability required in such an ambitious project.

So, hi Lydia. Welcome back nice to see you. I feel like a few things have been happening, since we last spoke. Do you want to tell us a bit about, what’s been unfolding?

Lydia: Yes, so when we last spoke, we had bought and renovated and extended, our one bed flat into a two bed flat. It’s in a, Edwardian terraced house in Leighton. and yeah. We, we’d done all that work. We’d sort of prepared ourselves for family. So we, I think, yeah, when I was just finishing it and putting up all the tiles at the time, I was pregnant.

And then now we’ve got our little daughter, Ada, she’s now two years old. So yeah, time has flown. She was born in 22 and. Literally that month, our upstairs neighbor, sooriginally it was a full house, divided into flats in the 70s, and our upstairs neighbour got on really well with, basically at the pub he said, I’ve got some news guys, I, I’m looking to sell the flat, do you know anyone who would be interested?

I sort of squealed and, you know,said, Oh, well, maybe, and 20 minutes later came back to him said, Yeah, well, us, and he said, Oh, well, I thought that might be the case. It was just an opportunity, could not let go. We absolutely love where we live, the community we’ve got around us, the networks we’re building, the friends that Ada’s getting, you know, everyone. So, yeah, we couldn’t let it pass. Begged, borrowed and stealed, you know, to just try and make a deposit. And we basically bought it as a buy to let upstairs.

So yeah, we bought it in September 23. He stayed renting until, March, so six months later. And then he found somewhere and was ready to move out.

And we were sort of like, right, okay. Because it had been obviously very convenient. we managed to buy it, but weirdly we were just given some keys and, we had to do the legal stuff, electrical certificate, gas certificate, and EPC, do a little bit of work on that basis. But it really just, got the

the professionals in to just, check a few things. He kept me on living there, so we didn’t have to renovate at that time, which was great because I was only just off maternity leave and various other things. And we also knew that the way they were living upstairs was sort of not ideal.

It was, We almost couldn’t see the floor, couldn’t see the walls.So we were quite happy not dealing with that for six months. And then March came around and we, could only really afford a month of essentially paying two mortgages.

So we then decided to renovate the flat upstairs in a month, was a bit mad, but we did it.

Jane: Nothing

Amy: did you do that?

Lydia: So we obviously took time off work. I thinkDan took a week off work. I took two weeks off work. We put Ada in nursery for extra days to try and clear our days, but also we had family stay as well to help us. And we had so many friends come and help as well. It was brilliant.

But also the funny thing is obviously living downstairs from the renovation that you’re doing upstairs. We could take the baby monitor upstairs and, keep working in the evenings. And it was fine as opposed to living separately. So yeah, I probably couldn’t choose a different way, a better way of doing a renovation on a separate property than living downstairs from it.

Jane: What did you do?

Lydia: So the flat upstairs, it’s kind of a traditional, layout, which is typical when it’s been divided up. Stairs going up into quite a big hallway, and really high ceilings, sort of three meter high ceilings up there. So really spacious hallway, and then kitchen at the back looking towards the garden and, also above our,

kitchen downstairs, and then it’s got, a kind of bathroom in the middle, also in the outrigger, and then the sort of front part of the house is a beautiful big room at the front, a smaller room next to it, so often in these properties that front of the house is one big room, but actually I think because the width of this property, being Edwardian looking over a park, it’s sort of six meters as opposed to your typical four and a half, that had a little box room kind of thing, at the front, and then the bedroom was behind looking towards the back, behind the front room.

Really lovely, well proportioned rooms, and the front, windows were original sash windows, you’ll see from the photos, they are just the beautiful kind of colored glass in the top. Yeah, and actually I was just saying that, yeah, downstairs, the people that had our flat before, they’d ripped theirs out and they’d put sort of U PVC.

So actually when our neighbours did the same thing, I sort of jumped on it and said, Oh, what are you doing with your windows? Can I, can I have them? You know, one day hopefully we’ll restore them. yeah, because it’s beautiful light coming in.

But the first thing we did was, I mean, the whole place was a state, as I say, kind of hoarder situation. it took a day to clear everything for the tenant before to clear everything out, sort of three van loads, lorry loads of stuff just taken out. So thenI called in a couple of favors from a builder friend, who sent a couple of his guys round to help rip up the carpets, which were essentially bold.

like felt carpets anyway, rip them up. All the original floorboards were underneath. Rip out some of the joinery that was there. There wasn’t much, but bookcases and things. And then in the back, in the kitchen, to rip out all of the kitchen units, And they were all separate appliances and everything.

There also was a pretty big pest issue, I would say, to put it lightly. So it was all a bit disgusting, really. but I’m glad we had help with that.

Amy: How long were those guys on site for?

Lydia: So they were here for two days.

And really got stuck in, which was brilliant. Um, we actually didn’t even help that much with the strip out at that stage.

It was sort of like, you guys crack on. The only downside to that is that, in the course of that process, I think we had three floods down to the flat underneath.

The first one was just the previous tenant pulling out his washing machine and it was just full of water.

So it came down into the living room. The next one was the plumber having doing the same thing. And then our builders stripping out everything. It was just. firing out of a, out of a pipe because all, all old, plumbing and, and everything, and kind of all over the place. Luckily we didn’t have much damage downstairs from that because I was sitting at the dining table with my laptop, heard the drips coming and managed to get bowls underneath

The issue came with the fourth flood, which was when, after a couple of days, the whole place was stripped out, I got some deep cleaners in to rinse the whole flat. The issue was that they were cleaning and actually didn’t hear, in the kitchen, it was coming out of a pipe, just flooding the whole floor and just dripping.

And I’d, ironically, I’d gone down the road to my lovely neighbor who had a beautiful Fennex worktop. that she is giving to us, that she’d kept in her workshop for a few years, was never going to use it. So she said, you have this, have it for free, So I was casting that back and forth.

So I’d gone for about 10 minutes and I came back in and it was just raining onto our cork floor, yeah, onto my laptop as well.So it turned out not to be a free worktop, unfortunately, but it’s all part of the process. Our floor is a little bit damaged, but hey, we have a two year old as well, so, this is how it goes.

Amy: You stripped it out, you got it cleaned, what happened next?

Lydia: So, the next big thing was the bathroom, I would say. So there’s like a, you sometimes see this on, in kind of old buildings and maybe 70s properties, separate toilet, which had a little window, and then, next to it was the bath and basin in a separate room. That had a door sort of accessed directly off the hall at a sort of angle.

And the toilet was slightly further down the hall, but they were next to each other. So that didn’t feel ideal. we really wanted to make it as good as possible in the time we had. And kind of knocking on the wall between them. we drilled a hole to see if it was solid or not.

And it turned out there was brickwork up to half height and then just hollow boarding on the rest. So we didn’t plan to do that, but we knocked down the wall. Not structural, knocked down the wall between the two.

We kept the toilet where it was, because obviously there’s only so much we want to do, as well. moved the bath and the basin along. And then we ended up building a new stud wall, to use the other door And made a little laundry room, which was really great for washing machine and everything.

So then the washing machine didn’t have to be in the kitchen and just give a bit more generosity to the kitchen.

Amy: Yeah.

Lydia: And it was great. We had, friends helping us at this stage One friend said, do you know what? I’m not going to go to the gym for a week. I just want to do heavy lifting.

don’t give me painting or something like that. I just want to do heavy lifting. So all the rubble that was coming out of the bathroom, we were just stacking in the hall and he would come for an hour a day, for about a week and just loaded it down. And it was so helpful. I mean, something like that just meant that we could just crack on.

So that was so helpful. And then another friend came for an afternoon and helped us build this, timber stud wall, between the bathroom and the new laundry room. that was amazing as well. I think at this point as well, so we were prepping the kitchen area.

I found a secondhand kitchen on Marketplace. So spent an afternoon going to this lady’s house and. Myself stripping out the kitchen. I think I did half a day then Dan came back the next day to finally strip it out and come back with the lorry with the kitchen in. So 250 quid for a really good second hand kitchen.

With the sink, the tap, you know, all that kind of stuff. This is obviously with a view that. I don’t know how many years time whenever we can afford it, but let’s say three years time when Ada’s five would be nice. It would be really, really lovely to merge the house at that point.

So that’s the kind of timeframe I suppose we’re thinking about in terms of a new, this, this replacement kitchen. And then we did get electricians in so they, except for the builders help at the beginning, the electricians were the only trade we got in and they pulled up loads of floorboards, rewired it, and they also rewired it completely with the view that, We would merge it one day, so they set us up really well for that.

Then we had a whole process of stripping back the walls. There was sort of polystyrene ceiling tiles in the bedroom.

Yeah, just stripped it all back, tried to kind of be cleaning it and everything. So that was sort of second week, I suppose. And then the final week, was painting everything, At this point we had our lovely friends Adam and Rebecca, who now rent the flat upstairs, and they are architects as well.

So they came and helped do loads of the painting and obviously had a view on what they wanted as well. So chose the paint colour for the floor. We’d originally planned to sand the floor. Which is, I suppose a long term view of what I would love to have up there.

But just looking at the time frame of it, you’d have to block out basically a week where, you can’t really access the floor. And then the process of oiling it, also the number of nails and pins and all of those kinds of things. Whereas I ended up cleaning and painting the floor in about two days, through the whole flat.

So, yeah, and then we have left, through their choice have left some of the kind of bare plaster walls where you can just see this like shadow of the, former picture rail, which is quite nice. Even some patches of slightly different paint color or plaster color.

It’s actually really lovely as a textural kind of space. So that’s particularly in the bedroom. In the bathroom, it was a bit of a patchwork process of merging what was obviously the WC, which had some tiling that we kept on the wall. And then I did a bit of tiling to merge that into where we had the sink and the bath come in.

Amy: Did you make tiles again?

Lydia: I did not make these tiles, sadly. No, it just unfortunately was not on the, the, timeframe trajectory.

Amy: I was going to say that would be really impressive.

Lydia: yeah, but also the ones that were in there already where you’re kind of, you know, 150 square tops tiles white.

Amy: Yeah.

Lydia: So keep that going round. And I think we had some leftover vinyl flooring from downstairs as well.

So yeah,It’s very much a kind of make do and mend project. Reuse things that left over from previous projects. . And I suppose give it a bit of a. Um, I don’t want to say shabby chic because that really sounds like it’s downplaying it like it’s obviously you’ll see but it’s such a beautiful space and then what Adam and Rebecca have done with their, I mean they’ve got exceptional taste in furniture.

It just all, it’s, yeah, lovely, light, fresh, and really works.

Amy: Wow. I feel like whistle stop, renovation. I mean, did they actually move in? So you’re, you’re kind of week three

Lydia: Yes. they moved in end of week three, we had a few little, you know, you could call it snagging or whatever sort of overhang into the next couple of weeks, finishing the bathroom. So,I mastic’d the whole bathroom as well. We had to move a radiator, do that.

So actually, worth mentioning, and Dan would like me to mention, I’m sure, that Dan did all the plumbing. for it as well. So we took all the copper pipe work back to essentially the kind of stopcock starter, and did a click fit, system, all the way through and into the kitchen as well.

So Yeah, really happy with that. It just made it really accessible to be able to do. And obviously we were very carefully monitoring if there were any leaks or anything, but,

Amy: Yes. You don’t want flood number five.

Lydia: Oh, I know. Exactly. Yeah. No, no, no, nothing so far. But, um, there’s been a few little bits of work that we’ve had to do since, spring.

when we got into really autumn and we’ve had some really, really heavy rains, sort of turns out that they’re the, all the lead flashing on the roof Was not fit for purpose. they were getting leaks into the bathroom. So we’ve had to have, yeah, roofer come and sort, sort that out.

And we are actually about to replace the bathroom window as well. Getting into winter, the sort of single glazed, window with an old fan in there. so replacing that window as well, but yeah.

Jane: So, Just to summarize, you said it was three weeks, full time for how many people,

Lydia: full time for me, Dan was probably half the time all the way through. And then four or five other friends for sort of a day or two over the process. In terms of spend

I think it cost about six grand or something like that. secondhand kitchen, paint, and some of the fixtures and fittings,

So yeah, new taps. we were able to reuse quite a lot of stuff.

Amy: I love that.

Lydia: And that includes the electrician’s fees as well. Which is quite a chunk of that.

Jane: Yeah, so the, the three week, six grand renovation, I love it.

Amy: I was just going to ask,how are your friends finding it

Lydia: Our friends absolutely love it. they’re really making their space, feel like home. They’ve got their lovely dog, Mella, up there as well, and she’s very happy. Um, and actually, we can, you know, still, we can go upstairs and have, dinner together with the baby monitor.

Um,so it’s like going round to a friend’s house, but upstairs.

Amy: I love that.

Jane: I would like, lessons learned and

top tips for a speed reno.

Lydia: Well, okay. Yeah. Lessons learned. really check your plumbing, before you sort of strip it out. I’m not sure. I mean, it just took us by surprise and obviously you’re always going to get surprises on a building project, no matter what. and it could have been much worse, I think, than, than it was.

I suppose we hadn’t quite learned our craft by that point in terms of doing the plumbing. So yeah, check your plumbing. Maybe get professionals in at that point. It was really weird though. The plumber was like, I’m going to have to cause another flood to get this washing machine out. So I don’t know, Yes. what else? I mean there are things I would definitely change, but I think we did amazingly in the sort of three weeks.

And just working with like minded people was really lovely.

friends who Yeah, wanted to come in, get stuck in, I suppose learn a bit on the job as well. There are friends who, so except for Adam and Rebecca who are architects, other friends don’t have much contact with, building projects and renovations, one of them just wanted to knock down a wall.

So, so yeah, I suppose, working with, with the right people and like minded, positive kind of attitude is really lovely.

Jane: And in terms of the pre planning, How much was just, you jumped in and did it as you went? Were there any things that required you to put lots of thought in advance so that you could have the three week deadline?

Lydia: Yeah, so we’ve had we had drawn it all up in CAD, so we’d surveyed it all obviously, drawn it up all in CAD, and measured the kitchen quite accurately to then plan the kitchen,

because then obviously if you are looking for a second hand kitchen, you do kind of need to make sure that it’s giving you what you need and you’re not going to have to try and get another second hand kitchen. But also the advantage with something like that is that you can also normally mix and match a little bit.

And there’s spare units and things often. So yeah, we planned the kitchen quite carefully. And that was, again, really nice that we were in consultation with Adam and Rebecca as well about how they wanted their kitchen and rather than doing a turn and a u shape where we could probably get more units in actually it just felt and maybe this is the architect sensibility in all of us it just felt neater and simpler to have one neat line of units.

And then the wall units above and it gave a bit more floor space, they’ve got a nice little table in there. and then,it also ironically obviously worked with the worktop that we were given and that was a bit of a surprise. we routed out the hole for the sink ourselves.

We learned a lot from doing our flat downstairs because we did the same when we did the worktop downstairs. So yeah, there was a lot of planning for the kitchen. I suppose only so much that you can do until you actually get in there. but yeah, it came together.

Amy: Oh, Well done. That’s amazing.

Lydia: I’m, what I’m quite excited about is maybe in, you know, three years time,

I might

Jane: Yes. And it’s part three doing the link up,

Lydia: Yeah, it’ll probably be four years time actually, because we will need a year to renovate. We will take our time, I think, once we get to that stage.

Jane: but who would have thought it would have been two years already since

Lydia: I know. I mean, kudos to you guys with your wonderful podcast as well.

I think I was episode three.

Jane: we’ll see if we’re still going in four years time. thanks Lydia.

Lydia: Great. Lovely to chat.