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??

@FrankieChips, I shall go and take some pictures of my dirt-encrusted architraving. They photoshop it out in the professional pics for some reason.

I think damp is a bit of a theme in 1930's houses.

I was most reassured when a surveyor came to our house and told me how damp was really normal and expected in these old places and that they are designed to get damp with condensation and then dry out. He said it becomes a problem when people do things that restrict the drying out process (usually in attempt to stop the damp). So I keep telling myself it's just the house breathing, or something.

Spiders... currently washing walls ready for redecorating, and are therefore making many of our spiders temporarily homeless. We have decided that rather than being very poor at housekeeping, we are OBVIOUSLY curating a valuable habitat and maintaining biodiversity. Or something..

We’ve got no damp or mound , I think it’s thanks to our draughty single glazed windows
We had a quote for replacement upvc ( we wanted wood ) and it was over £20k , we can’t justify that amount ( and I’d rather go on holiday)

I'm in denial about the new household of spiders I'll be moving into

I will confess to feeling totally overwhelmed by ours. We're three weeks in, so I know it's not long, but a bit paralysed by the scale of it.

Big old stone built Georgian place with a horrible 2 story flat roof extension done in 70s. 6 bedrooms altogether. It's going to be FREEZING in winter.

Things we know we need are:

• Roof on main house fixing up, missing slates etc,
• New flat roof as it has clearly failed. Damp coming through ceilings in extension
• full re-wire
• new boiler and central heating system, plumbing etc
• external work such as re-pointing and some replacement block work due to bad weathering on gable end. Chimney stacks
• new windows
• lots of re-plastering
• decoration throughout

The big part of project is we want to knock some internal walls down to make a big kitchen/diner and make better use of extension. This will involve moving kitchen and lots of steel we think...

So will also need

• new kitchen
• 2 new bathrooms
• would like additional ensuite creating from small bedroom next to master.

Our dilemma is we don't know how to start, as we feel we want to get advice from an architect re changing layout and also whether to turn flat roof into a pitched roof (this will require underpinning of extension to take extra weight), but have been advised to live in it for a while first before doing this. BUT the roof is leaking and WINTER IS COMING (yes, GOT ref 😉)

We also feel so much of it needs doing at same time, like re-wire and plumbing/ heating system needs to be done at same time as knocking through and changing layout as we'll to know where sockets/lighting radiators going. Also loads more will need doing after re-wire as will be a total mess!

We have got a decent amount to start (£100k), but not sure what to do...

Gosh, so long. Sorry! Been ruminating on this for weeks and just splurged. Sorry for length of post. Any advice from those with more experience greatly received!

Hi kdubs- is it listed? That will delay things as you'll need consent to rearrange interiors.

I honestly would recommend living in it for as long as you can - we did (Georgian moneypit also) and I can't rell you how it made a difference to what we decided to do. Ime it takes time to decide how you want to use the rooms. So for e.g. We had a room that was a dining room when we moved in and we decorated it but just didn't use it. Mainly because the sofas in there were too far apart, there was nowhere to put a drink, and so it became a room we walked through to get somewhere else. Once we realised that we added side tables, a desk to make the most of the huge bay window and lovely view and moved the sofas do they were at right angles to each other. And suddenly we use it.

I know that makes us sound dim! So I would concentrate on absolute essentials first, like water coming in (we had water pouring through a ceiling on day1) and then imagine what you want to use each room for and plan accordingly.

Do the leaking flat roof - a cheap and cheerful recover wouldn't be all that much and would buy you time to then live in the house and see how you use it. Ditto, if it is really leaking, someone to replace the tiles on the main roof.

We did the dangerous stuff first - condemned electrics, terrifying plumbing, new boiler (huge, ie big enough for additional radiators as we did up the house, as the old one had been condemned) & basic central heating. Oh, and the windows which bulged inwards, threatening to cover everyone with shards of glass, whenever the wind blew, though tbh we were a bit slow off the mark on that one.

Yes, we have had to move and add radiators and sockets as we have done rooms up, but the systems were designed with that in mind (all our central heating pipes are dropped / raised from main pipes in the ceiling of the ground floor, and importantly none are buried in walls, so chopping and changing is really very straightforward) and being able to get the 'every part of the house a mess' stage over and done with in 1 hit and then concentrate on a smaller area at a time was really useful.

Oh, and don't be afraid to simply close the door on some rooms. We had 1 bathroom and a bare plastered room with a few pipes in for quite a long time, and 1 of the bedrooms was closed off as a junk room for much of the first year.

Then buy the means to get 1 room really warm (oil filled electric radiators are good), electric blankets and good thick slippers and socks, and live out the first winter.

Our 1930s money pit is quite ungrabby compared with some of these. We did buy the house off people who were too incompetent to even change a light bulb without breaking something, though.

We have a 7 legged spider living in the house. She occasionally comes to say hello to my feet. Very welcome, unlike the CF mice who come running through the garden if they hear a crisp packet.

Agree about being handy. In the first week here, dh fixed all the sticking and creaking doorknobs, mended the bent oven door so I didn't end up needing to shell out for another one and replaced a capacitor in the central heating controller so we could actually use the heating.

We had a damp basement that occasionally flooded with "ground water" according to Thames.
Eventually we installed a pump.
5 years ago we discovered the rainwater drain was blocked by tree roots and mud. Thames cleared it, no floods since, dry as a bone.

Thanks for the advice and tips @cantkeepawayforever and @waterandlemonjuice .

It's not listed, no, hence the heinous extension 😆

I have taken the plunge today and asked a flat roofer to come round to have a look a d my dad has come through with someone who can patch the main roof.

Good advice about getting one room warm, I have a two year old so do worry about that.

@cantkeepawayforever VERY interested in what you said re boiler and piping. I will enquiry about that!!

Thanks so much, feeling a bit less lost, for now at least!

@watermelonjuice I don't think the house I want to buy has every had any proper tanking, floors are all still original flagstone. But they have been using the basement as actual rooms with electricty, lighting; an occassional bedroom and a music room. The have a dehumidifier going constantly. You say you tank your basement. How did that go and approx how much did it cost? Which method did you use? Thanks in advance :)

kdubs the advice I was given is to make the shell watertight and solid before anything else. Then plan all the internal work to ensure you do it in the right order.

I have renovated a listed Georgian property and despite this advice still made silly mistakes. This week a failure to replace the Fuse Board has bitten me. Because I need to replace the Earth wire I now have to cut through my beautiful wooden floor or take the Earth up the wals, through the loft and down an external wall. The £450 cost of the board has turned into £2.5k

Good luck with your renovation. It will help you grow to love the house.

Hi DLR32, we used a membrane system in our basement. Tanking is (as I understand it) where cement is painted onto the walls to try to hold back the water, which always gets through eventually, whereas a membrane allows the water to run down but covers it with a membrane and ensures it all runs off into a drain of some kind - we have a pump installed. Ours cost about £15k.

This kind of thing

www.directpumpsandtanks.co.uk/products-services/aqua-product-range/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIovCZzKWI3QIV5p3tCh2n-AaCEAAYASAAEgKPAvD_BwE

www.permagard.co.uk/advice/tanking-a-cellar-guide

I'm in. Victorian moneypit. So far: repainted inside and out (twice), new boiler, new kitchen, crumbling window sills replaced, new chimney stack, damp-proofing, two new bathrooms, new flooring and underfloor heating in the master bedroom, new light fittings, new curtain rails, curtains and blinds, new front door, new garden fence and gate.

Still to go: new flooring and underfloor heating in the guest bedroom, replace the existing fireplace in the sitting room with one that is complete (it is a coal fire and missing a panel on one side - you can't see it but I know it's missing and it bothers me), new carpeting in the hallway, new flooring and underfloor heating in the sitting room, replace the door that was removed in the sitting room when the loft was converted to a master bedroom suite, etc.

Great thread, everyone. Commiserations/congratulations, whichever apply, on your various money-pits. 350-year-old non-listed house here, which turned out to have had very little done to it except all the horrors cunningly covered up by the time we bought it.

Work we did: Replacement roof installed - of reclaimed old tiles - new (reconfigured) kitchen and bathroom done, every room replastered, most windows repaired/replaced like-for-like, specialist lime plaster used. Cost £££££. One major disaster along the way thanks to utterly incompetent builders. We're now going round re-doing maintenance but thank God the big stuff's done.

What I wanted to say was that Essex County Council run brilliant practical courses for home-owners. They used to do a great lime-plaster one that gave you the ability and confidence to do small repairs (or larger ones, if you were gung-ho). But unfortunately I'm not sure they still run that one. However, info on the current programme here

Thanks @waterandlemonjuice ! Sorry for sounding silly, I had read lots about the membrane system, and Dryfan as well as the slurry. I seem to be chucking them all into the one 'tanking' term, which as you point out, isn't right. But thanks so much for the info. It's really helpful. I've just read so much about issues with trying to waterproof a basement, that I wondered whether it was just worth steering clear!

@Kdubs1981 re the central heating system.

When we bought the house, it had a single pipe / single loop central heating system with big round pipes, mostly at skirting level in each room and, importantly, visible. It was possibly original - though all the rooms did also have fireplaces - but certainly wasn't much newer than the house. It had those big cast iron radiators that old schools often had.

So when we replaced it with a modern 2-pipe system, and a new boiler (the old one would have been more at home in an ocean-going liner), we were replacing visible pipes with visible pipes and that felt fine. (Our plumber had done the same in his own house, and part of his sales pitch was for me to visit his own money-pit mid-restoration!).

Upstairs, there is very little visible piping - basically an up pipe and a down pipe from each radiator into the floor, which is normal.

Downstairs, for each radiator in the 'configured as when we bought it' part of the house there is a pair of pipes coming down the wall together for each radiator. They're painted to match the walls, and the plumber was a real artist in copper piping so they are straight, parallel and blemish-free. Most are in corners.

Where rooms have been more extensively refurbished - kitchen, bathrooms / toilets - the pipes have been re-configured and more conventionally buried in the walls behind new plastering as part of the process (which always post-dated the original re-plumbing and came once we were certain that all was exactly where we wanted it).

It's not a solution that would work in every house - it would be unusual to replace conventionally 'plastered over' piping with visible piping - but in a house that already had highly visible pipes it was entirely acceptable to us visually and made it possible to do the full replumbing and reheating as part of the 'first sweep' of renovation.

As I understand from my builder and architect, we have put a damp proof membrane in, and further 'tanked' our basement with sika render. The finish isn't as smooth as plaster but it should, I hope, be waterproof. The new ceilings and walls are insulated, there's a window, and an extract fan too.... I sincerely hope they know what they were doing!

I had an old house years ago, and one of the features was polished copper pipe to a radiator in the dining room. Added copper lampshade and a copper patterned wallpaper on a feature wall (this was 1980s prior to feature walls being a 'thing' and copper lampshades were 'in'), and people seemed to like it. Used to pin a plastic sheet behind the pipes to polish them, apparently, I'm told, the new home owners polished them without protecting the wall - so they then got painted

@MikeFallopian
Thank you for link to Essex County Council. Looks very helpful. Another money pit owner here. The previous owners had replaced the 17th century roof, replaced the boiler and updated the upstairs bathroom. And painted almost everything magnolia. Including the kitchen - units, walls, window, radiator - the lot. Two years in and I have repainted just over half the rooms. Almost all the windows need repairs and some need replacing. Back half is a 19th century which we think was for family accommodation when this was a shop. Our entrance hall was a butcher's. We've managed to find a number of postcards showing our house from the 19th century onwards which is fascinating.

Pleasure, BayTrees. I now really fancy the brickwork course at Hatfield House! (And we do have a walled garden with a very old brick wall desperately in need of re-pointing....).

For anyone upthread who might still be interested in lime plaster training, I reckon you could do a lot worse than book one of these courses. Mike Wye is one of the great champions of lime as a traditional building material and we've bought materials from him in the past. You would have to go to Devon to attend a course but that might be rather nice

I so want to go on a brickwork course now MikeFallopian

The Mike Wye "Practical Lime" course looks good - entry level - so I've sent the link to DP to see what he thinks. We need quite a lot of repointing done and at least a few bricks need to be removed and replaced. The structural survey did pick up on this but said they weren't immediately concerning. I'd love to be able to do this myself.

I love the sound of your walled garden. We have a walled courtyard, which I fell in love with when we viewed the house. I suspect this needs some TLC too as I'd imagine the enormous climber covering most of two walls is not doing the brickwork any favours.