Moneypit Owners Club - anyone want to join me?

[Daisypullsitoff]

So we recently moved into my dream house - original Victorian floor tiles, towering ceilings, original fireplaces etc etc. And I'm freaking out. I just keep seeing more cracks, missing tiles and the mountains of dust I'm going to have to spend hours every week vacuuming! I think it's a natural wobble now that the excitement of moving in has worn off (and we found out yesterday that the basement is not 'converted' as we thought and would better serve as a paddling pool). But I've seen lots of interesting threads on here with people dealing with similar issues and I wondered if there was a way of bringing some of us together to swap tips/nightmares etc.

So my first question if anyone is reading this:

Do you just learn to ignore the cracks? And the dust? Or do you spend your life constantly repainting and dusting??

That made me laugh @harriet !
We’ve had everywhere painted white .
It was all a dingy cream , with a rather attractive range of ceilings including 1980s orange sauna pine and dark brown old wood !
Everything white has lightened things up amazingly

Ours was all brilliant white. Painted the lounge stiffkey blue, bedroom a lovely sludgy green....6 months later the white cracks from blown plaster and movement started appearing 😬 now see why previous owners went for white!

Scotinoz would ypu be able to give me the website address for Heritage Windows or link me in.

This might be just what I need to solve my window issues, but I can't seem to find them online.

@Doilooklikeatourist ha! The white is actually a huge improvement on what was there before, don't get me wrong! I'd like to decorate each room though. Feel like we've scrubbed out the old house and it's now a blank canvas.

I'm going to contact some garden cos today to get quotes for landscaping the garden, and curtains are being fitted this morning.

I'm on mat leave til jan and would like to have painted the bathroom and the baby's room by then.

We've just put a dehumidifier in the cellar, is addictive looking at how much water its pulled out each day!

We've just bought a late 20's money pit. It's got some beautiful features like original oak flooring and doors, and some awful 80's upgrades.

So far we done a full rewire and stripped every room.

We have a long way to go.

@SweepTheHalls this made me chuckle! 😆

I've found my people!

We recently moved into a slightly newer moneypit (1940s) but wow, it's going to be a long long term project it's a six bed house so even small jobs are taking forever

So far we've had/are planning:

Full rewire
Full replaster
New roof
Re-pointing
New chimney stack
Guttering
Damp proofing
Floors sanding
New front door
Re-render front of the house
1/4 acre of garden to landscape

We've only been in for about 5 months but every day we seem to notice more jobs!!

Here are my people!!!

Late 1920s, large (4 bedrooms, but each large enough to have a party in). Been here 7 or 8 years. Did the emergency stuff before we moved in

• Wiring
• Plumbing
• Heating
• New windows

Then did major cosmetic work

• Kitchen
• Bathrooms
• Sanded the floors
• Obliterated the 'interesting' wallpapers and paint colours.

Just doing the second round

• Roof (12,000 tiles later....triple gables may LOOk pretty but boy, do they take a lot of tiles)
• New garage (asbestos, wonky walls, totally decayed timber)
• External repainting (310 litres of masonry paint on the rough pebbledash, preceded by the replacement of a LOT of said pebbledash)

Contemplating the urgent need for repainting, especially all the water staining from the old roof leaks...but the garden (in particular a very strange workshop - more asbestos) might need extra work first.

It's its huge size that gets us every time. Everything needs SO MUCH of anything. And it is SO COLD....

(Oh, and I forgot to mention that the house slopes quite acutely front to back. The new garage floor level was set to be 15 cm below the kitchen floor, about halfway along the side wall of the house. By the front of the garage, not even level with the front of the house, the garage floor dangles a good 30-40 cm above driveway level, and that's AFTER the builder dropper it down a further 15 cm from the design...)

@cantkeep ! the cold ! So cold in the winter , and stuffy in the summer
The old part of the house only has windows at the front , so no chance of a nice draught coming through ( not double glazed , obviously , part of the 1980s renovation )

The oil froze in the pipe leading to the central heating boiler when the beast from the east swept through

We’re hoping to put electric radiators in the bedrooms soon , as we can’t face the hassle getting pipework to go through the thick stone walls to carry the central heating upstairs

DoILook - our best renovation step was to install a woodburner instead of the open fire in the sitting room. To begin with it got rid of the howling chimney draught, and it does mean we can get one room genuinely warm without feeling we are simply releasing £10 notes through the walls.

Our coat rack is at the back of the hallway, rather than right next to the front door, so by the time we have got to the rack we can make an informed decision about whether it is sensible to take the coat off at all. I believe that some people don't wear scarves indoors.... and DS has been known to do music practice in fingerless mittens.

Oh, and electric blankets are a lifesaver. We don't even try heating the bedrooms to very far above icy.

Luckily, we're usually cool in the summer, though this year's hot weather saw us with scaffolding blocking all but 1 upstairs window from opening

I did think seriously about trying to move the bed down to the sitting room and the log burner ...

DLR hmm, I wouldn't touch a cellar where they haven't properly converted it. Not in a listed building.

Our house is beautifully cool in the hot weather and although it warms up eventually in the winter there's no point in putting the heating on for anything under about 4 hours as it makes no difference. Our bills are huge.

But I love it, it's quirky and old and pretty and rambling and feels like home. So far we have:

Put in a new kitchen
damp proofed the cellar
Replaced 2 of the bathrooms
Painted and changed loo and sink in boot room
Completely changed the layout of the utility room, new appliances
redecorated the drawing room, living room, plus all the bedrooms
New carpets throughout
New light switches throughout
New curtains in every room
re gravelled the drive three times
Painted the halls and landings
Replaced all the wall lights

I think we've spent about £150k so far. Still to do
2 other bathrooms
Some doors need painting
Some lights were missed
Door handles
Outside woodwork needs painting
Some pointing needs looking at

And there's probably more...

@cantkeepaway that sounds like our place.... and just like my neighbour

I don't thuink yiou can be my neighbour - neighbouring 6 bedroom house was built in the early 2000s on half our house's garden (the croquet lawn and the orchard, to be precise).

We bought this house for its garden - even halved, it is wonderfully large for a house within 10 mins' walk of the centre of a large town.

that's a relief! I'd be forced to name change We also partly bought for the garden and will also be selling part of it I'll resist the description

House opposite, on a smaller plot than ours (though a more useful shape - ours is triangular), has been demolished and is in the process of being replaced by 6x4 bedroom houses + garages....

I'm joining too! We have a 1930s end of terrace that we loved when we first moved into 2 years ago. Now I can't sleep for worrying about money. My OH is concentrating on getting the mortgage down and wants to wait until we have more money saved (we went over our budget for this house and used most of our savings on the deposit. Lesson learned). We had to get the garden wall fixed which cost 7k. The shared drain in the front garden collapsed and flooded the back garden with sewage. We are still waiting on Thames Water and the council to negotiate the road outside being closed so it can be fixed. In the meantime we haven't used the garden as it's a mess with the sewage (despite Thames version of a clean up) and we want to wait for the drain to be fixed before we get it done in case there is another leak. The previous owner wallpapered over a wall which seems to have penetrating damp. The dwarf wall in the conservatory seems to be sinking at one end (maybe because of the collapsed drain). The roof needs replacing. The UVPC window seals in some rooms seem to be faulty and we have condensation. One of the window sills in the hall seems to have a hole in it. There is mould in the bedroom. The one good thing is the cat loves her new home! She hated the last flat we lived in and stress groomed. Now she's relaxed and happy.

skippyhappy Can you rent your hubby out to us for a few weeks. It sounds like everything we will need to do to our house very soon!

I'm joining. I have an 1850s money-pit. The way I cope is to just accept that it is a project which will never be finished, sort of like a dysfunctional, much-loved, terribly needy family member. I just bits at a time and accept this will be ongoing.

The cellar is damp and potentially collapsing. Most of the walls have signs of damp. There are cracks in most places, the windows are mms thick and the wind whistles through them in the winter because so many frames are rotten (I got a quote to replace them and it was upwards of £20k). Ceilings need re-plastering because of leaks and the damp has entirely ruined the kitchen floor meaning I've had to rip the whole thing out. None of the doors fit in their frames.

I rent it out for photoshoots though, so I'm reasoning that it can't been too terrible. I mean, the photoshoots aren't horror-themed or anything.

sort of like a dysfunctional, much-loved, terribly needy family member

EXACTLY. When planning the re-roofing and picking the right tile colour, I said to the builder 'We don't want her looking like an old lady wearing an an inappropriately gaudy bonnet', which to his credit he didn't fall around laughing at and simply replied 'No, she'll look great'. Has a definite, strong personality - not malevolent, but like one of those cranky family matriarchs who resists change while requiring constant close personal attention.

We moved into our potential money pit in January. It's early Georgian and G2 listed so I know that whatever will need doing in the years to come will be both expensive and bureaucratic (going by the 5cm deep pile of planning and listed building paperwork we got as part of the conveyancing).

We don't have a cellar but do have a lower ground floor which is tanked and dry.

Fortunately most of the work has been done for us by the previous owners so we (hopefully) are only looking at maintenance.

All we've done so far is had the original casement windows to the front of the house treated and repainted professionally. On my to-do list for the Autumn are some re-pointing of brickwork in the south west corner, getting the electrics checked (it was flagged in the survey are overdue). Both shouldn't be too expensive, fingers crossed. We also need to get someone in to sort out the heating system. It suffers from add-on syndrome and there are two boilers, four house zones and so much pipework it's ridiculous.

Things I'd like to do in the future - move the main bathroom to the room above the lower ground floor WC and utility room (to make the plumbing slightly less of a confused mess), replace the hall, stairs and landing carpet. I may need another mortgage to do this though as the house has five levels so it's a big job. I'd also like to have dormers put in the rear of the attic rooms. We'd never get permission to do it at the front but there are already velux in the attic rooms at the rear and I'd like to replace these with proper dormers. This is definitely a wish list item rather than a to-do item though.

We moved from a 1990's house and whilst I love this house immensely I do worry about how much it will cost to run compared to a more modern house.

The amount of cleaning is exponentially larger than the old house. There are high ceilings and wood panelling which need dusting and polishing and, wow, the spiders! Enormous coach loads of spiders from little spindly legged things to enormous Aragog sized ones. They are EVERYWHERE. I swear one was so large I thought it was going to eat the dog I don't seem to be able to clean fast enough to keep the place spider web free.

@Ventress, lol at Aragog the spider. We had one in our bathroom last night. Had to shout my partner up to get it outside.

I do wish I had bought a 60s build as my mum's last two houses have been 60s builds and she's never had any problems at all. Even the double glazing has lasted 20 years without any issues and it's still going strong.

@Greypaw, I'd love to see some photos of your house! It sounds amazing.

Although 1930s is nothing like a listed building.

Goodness FrankieChips I'd rather a house full of Aragog's than the issues you've faced with your house!

I grew up in a 1930's house in the West London 'burbs and loved it. In fact, I wanted a 1930/40s house this time round but there aren't many where we are now. I love the huge rooms, high ceilings, big gardens and ours had a wonderful stained glass window on the landing too. Awesome

I think damp is a bit of a theme in 1930's houses. My parents have dehumidifiers in all their rooms as do most of their friends in similar houses.