Do the good things about this house outweigh the (many) bad things?

[LadyCroissantAuBeurre]

Moved into this Victorian terraced house over a year ago and I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say that it almost caused me to have a complete mental collapse*.

*We found two massive leaks when we finally figured out how to turn the water on, the floor by the front door collapsed while the removal men were carrying our fridge in and we soon realised the neither the boiler nor the oven were working. And this was just Day One!

HOWEVER, the good things about this house are really good... so I'm finding it difficult to decide between staying and fully committing to doing the place up or just cutting our losses and trying to find somewhere else (although that of course would very much hinge on someone else being silly enough to buy this place...).

Here is a list of the good, the bad and the downright bizarre (yes, I am attempting to outsource this decision - please help).

The Good

• The location (it absolutely could not be more perfect for us)
• The number and size of the rooms, particularly the really decent-sized kitchen which means we can have a kitchen table
• Two bathrooms, one of which is upstairs (not always a given in this kind of house)
• The size of the garden (and the general vibe back there)
• Loads of natural light throughout the house / really nice 'feel'
• The fact that it's an old house (pretty much all the original features have been ripped out when it was 'renovated' but, if we decide to stay, we can always add stuff back in)
• The ground floor layout means that we could easily live downstairs when we get older if going upstairs starts to prove difficult (hopefully that's many decades away but we're the type of people who like to plan ahead)
• It now has a decent, functioning roof (which we know as we spent a lot of money sorting this out in the first few months of living here...)
• Extension / loft conversion potential should we ever be mad enough to consider this.

The Bad

• There are areas of damp, some of which (we think) we know the reasons* *for and others we can only anxiously guess at (damp proof surveyor was very little use and this is such a contentious issue that it's hard to know whose advice to trust)
• The whole building is covered in concrete render (which - naturally - we didn't realise was a potential issue until we'd moved in and started googling 'nightmare Victorian houses'). I worry that if we get someone in to remove this, they're going to discover that the bricks behind it are unsalvageable.
• Whoever renovated this place was obsessed with concrete. There's so much concrete in the side alley way that someone has dug out a load of it to free the air brick (thus providing a convenient 'slide' for rainwater to get in...). The garden is several layers of concrete deep and raised above the level of our neighbours' gardens. Sometimes I worry there are bodies under there...
• Some of the floorboards feel/sound incredibly dodgy. I know I'm* *still affected by the small matter of the HALLWAY FLOOR COLLAPSING WITHIN MINUTES OF US MOVING IN but I can't shake the fear that all the dodgy areas of floor in the house are just teetering on the brink of full or partial collapse. I know lots of old houses have uneven floors but I really worry that ours are all rotten.
• The downstairs bathroom is a small, single story extension on the back of the house that would have come under permitted development. There are no building control records for it and we got no info from the seller (probate). I worry that the huge amount of concrete back there and the raised ground level is all down to this extension - judging by the 'work' done on the rest of the house, I don't trust that this was built correctly / within regulations. Sometimes I wonder if it's only all that concrete that's holding it up...

The Downright Bizzare

• Two windows, covered by plasterboard so you can only see them from the outside. WHY?
• A weird smell emanating from the understairs cupboard. But only sometimes. Other times it's fine. This doesn't appear to be caused by anything in particular (e.g. when it rains). Fills me with absolute, irrational dread when it happens.

I'm probably missing some other stuff <cry-laughs hysterically> but hopefully you get the gist. WWYD in my situation? I'm finding it hard to commit to further investigations or works when I'm still undecided.

I grew up in a very early Victorian house, was built 1840. it looked beautiful, it was a huge town house it had 8 bedrooms.

I will never ever live in a really old house again, it drove my Mother to despair. They do look fab and if you have a lot of money to get things done properly it will be fine, she just never had quite enough money to sort it all out. It’s been converted in to five 2 bed flats now.

i think a lot depends on availability of other houses- do properties come up in that location often?
though OP made a good point about the moving costs.
and presumably all other properties around there are also Victorian terraces?
I think get all the concrete taken up - can you do this whilst on holiday? Do you get in with your neighbours?
and get some body bags ready just in cases

Oh gosh, I can see why that would have put you off. My previous house (in a different part of the country) was a 1970s build and I never had a single issue with it - so I really wasn't at all prepared for what this house was going to be like.

We owned two Victorian terraces.
now in a 1930’s semi with massive 20 year old extension.
its so much more solid.

I would suggest make a massive To Do list and just keep working on it - I had one of those houses once, absolutely loved the location and the garden, but in the 1970s had been very badly extended....
Eventually I finished the critical bits such as installing a kitchen (had no kitchen whatsoever), and replacing the bath (had a hole), replastering one very visible wall so it was straight, insulating the loft, and rewiring the dodgy 1970s rewiring - and ultimately sold it very easily, I think due to location and garden!

However there were still a good two dozen things I never tackled from my List which until it went on the market was firmly fixed to a kitchen cupboard door - what I didn't realise was that over 11 years the morning sun faded the wooden door around The List, and I had to do a bit of an emergency polish job with mayonnaise to make the doors match that side of the kitchen.

All of the houses around here are Victorian, Edwardian or 1930s, with many of them either converted into flats or used as HMOs. You see the occasional new build but they're few and far between and very expensive. So, realistically, it's an old house or nothing.

We looked at quite a few houses that were very obviously in need of renovation but rejected them in favour of this one that apparently didn't need any work (<hollow laugh>). So, honestly, I'm not sure I trust any of the houses around here - we could just end up with an 'out of the frying pan, into the fire' situation...

Your 'good' list really is very impressive and not to be tossed aside lightly.

As long as you still have some ££ and headspace to throw at it, I would carry on and abandon all other hobbies for the foreseeable future.

We had to remove the concrete render from our lovely regency house when we moved in. It was only on the front (but 8 bays so very big). It wasn't that disruptive nor was it hugely expensive. We replaced it with traditional lime render as the bricks were in a terrible state (hence the render in the first place). Instantly solved our damp problems.

We have one of those houses too OP, and we also had no idea of the scale of the problems it has. Some were evident but weren't scary, my previous house had been a renovation job so we weren't put off by the thought of some work. But there have just been so many hidden issues (that wouldn't have shown up on a survey) most likely caused by a bodger previous owner.

But like yours, ours is in the perfect location - the reason we bought it over others that were bigger - and we do love it, it feels very like home and will be wonderful once the work is done.

In your place I'd focus on getting rid of all that concrete first and foremost, since the roof has been replaced. I bet the concrete is the root cause of all the damp.

A weird smell emanating from the understairs cupboard. But only sometimes. Other times it's fine. This doesn't appear to be caused by anything in particular (e.g. when it rains). Fills me with absolute, irrational dread when it happens.

What’s in the understairs cupboard? When my previous house had a weird smell in the understairs cupboard, it was a short circuit near the electric meter/consumer unit and the main fuse was roasting hot. It got worse when we were using lots of electricity. If there is electrics in there, don’t touch anything, get them checked. If the main supply cable/fuse/meter are in there, call 105 to get your local network operator to check them. It’s free and available 24 hours a day (we had someone round in minutes checking ours, then several more vans and men fixing it for a few hours).

Oh gosh, that sounds terrifying! Our consumer unit is near the front door so hopefully the smell isn't related to the electrics. The understairs cupboard was the site of one of the major leaks (knackered old stopcock) so a damp/musty smell does make sense but I'm very confused by the fact that it comes and goes for no obvious reason.

One more thing to add to the 'bad' list - just got a quote for new windows and it's £26K 😱

Oh and the guy found a few more bodge jobs for us on his way around the house - including a hollow area around a window where someone had taken out the old architrave and then just covered it up with plasterboard. Presumably to hide something they didn't want potential buyers to see - so I'm obviously very excited to find out what that might be...