Out of Probate, Into Chaos: Our First House
Three years ago this June, we picked up the keys to a house that had come out of probate, and walked into what I can only describe as a 1960s time warp. No renovation since, as far as we could tell. It was, and I say this with real affection, a lot.
The Outside of our first house, and That Enormous Blue Fir
The front of the house is dominated by a genuinely massive blue fir tree that's been there so long it's basically load bearing at this point, towering over the garage and the hedge like it's personally vetting everyone who walks up the drive. It's the first thing you see in every photo we took of the place, half the house eclipsed by it. Sadly it's now gone but the neighbours were very happy to see it go.
The Hallway and Stairs
Original pine panelling greets you at the front door and still sits proudly above the stairs, which still have their original carpet doing its best impression of something from a 1970s Sears catalogue. Under that carpet, in the upstairs hallway, we found a floorboard that wasn't a floorboard at all, it was a repurposed panel from the previous owner's military trunk. He'd been ex-military police, and it turns out when you need a quick fix and have a spare wooden crate lying around, you just use the crate. Respect, honestly.
The Kitchen (My Favourite Room, Genuinely)
The kitchen is the room I will defend to the death. Yellow tiles, fully intact, not a crack or a spot of mould in sight, which after everything else we found in this house felt like being personally thanked by whoever built it. Dark brown countertops, a wall mounted microwave with a hinged worksurface underneath it that folds down like something out of a submarine, original wall hung scales that I have since used to weigh a potato purely to confirm they still work (they do, to a fairly alarming degree of precision), and a dishwasher that still had the plastic film on the inside. Untouched. Frozen in time. On day two Mike managed to pull the plug straight out of the sink, taking the waste pipe with it, which felt like a fairly on brand welcome to homeownership. Fixed with a YouTube video and slightly more confidence than the situation probably warranted.
There's also a serving hatch through to the kitchen, which at the time felt like a slightly baffling relic. Two years later, when I couldn't walk, it became genuinely one of the most useful things in the house. Turns out 1960s builders understood something about mobility that most modern kitchens have completely forgotten.
The Lounge, the Panelling, and That Conservatory
The lounge has its original stone fireplace and wood panelling, both of which I love unreservedly, and both of which are doing battle with a truly bizarre conservatory extension divided by a floating wall that darkens the space and limits life. Ripping it out was top of the list, and what a pain that turned out to be. Worth it now.
Three Bedrooms, Three Different Eras of Bad Wallpaper
All three doubles came wrapped in wallpaper with the kind of shine you'd normally associate with wet paint, and every ceiling in the house, without exception, is lined in polystyrene tiles, which I've come to think of as the house's unifying design language whether it wanted one or not.
The smallest room is now Mike's office and the cat's room, and it's where we cut our teeth on click clack flooring and wallpapering for the first time. It's alright. Not going in a magazine, but alright.
The largest room came with the heaviest built-in wardrobes I've ever wrestled with in my life, and once we got them down we found dark brown floral wallpaper underneath so intense I imagine staring at it for too long would be a genuinely psychedelic experience. That room is currently gutted and looking like something out of a crime drama, on pause while we sort the living room layout first.
The front room gets the morning sun, has yellow wallpaper and blue carpet, and the sweetest built-in wardrobes of the three. That one's earmarked as a spare room and something closer to a little art studio for me, which feels like the correct use of good light.
The Avocado Bathroom (RIP)
The bathroom was a full avocado suite, green wall and floor tiles, a properly beautiful 70s backlit mirror, and a bath my dad took one look at and told us not to stand in, right before someone nearly went straight through it. Months later we gutted the whole thing and discovered years of, let's say, misdirected use had seeped all the way down to the subfloor. While we were in there we also moved the soil stack outside, at which point we discovered it was half cast iron, half asbestos, which is a sentence I did not expect to type about my own house. It's a proper shower and bath now. Genuinely one of the best decisions we've made here.
The Garden
The garden got me, properly. You could tell whoever lived here before loved it, and that it had been left to slowly go wild after they couldn't keep up with it anymore. Multiple fruit trees, two kinds of pear, peaches, apple, a Victorian plum, quince, all just quietly doing their thing while everything around them grew over. It sits on a split level, and tucked right at the back we found a greenhouse and a shed, both proper time capsules in their own right, pots and soil lined up on shelves like someone was mid-project and just never came back to finish it. I've thought more than once about whether they knew that one spring would be their last one to sow anything. In the half collapsed shed we found actual gardening tools and a shredder that has come in extremely handy since.
The Garage
If the house was chaos, the garage was the opposite. Fully organised, an old two-storey wooden ladder, screws and tacks sorted into tall jars screwed into a shelf at exactly eye level, fuse wire for the original fuse box, which we still haven't got round to replacing. Whoever this man was, he ran a tight ship. I like to think some of that discipline has rubbed off on the house, even if the garden had other ideas.
Where We're Headed
This house has been genuinely hard work, and I'll get properly into that in another post, because it deserves its own rant. But I love it, quirks and all, and if anything the strangeness of it has been the thing that keeps me creatively invested rather than putting me off. I've been slowly, gently, trying to steer the whole place towards a proper mid-century modern feel, clean lines, warm wood, a bit of that brutalist confidence where a room isn't afraid to just be a shape. I think I'm winning Mike over. Slowly. One room at a time.
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