It’s funny what can change with an idle scroll. For context, I’m something of a serial renovator. I was raised by the kind of people who, on family days out, pull the car over to inspect skips, then extract a door from one of them. A place isn’t home until I’ve given it a lick of paint or put up a shelf, or, ideally, smashed through a wall. Other people may get excited by perfectly finished bathrooms or kitchens, but I feel a faint sense of disappointment. Combine this with the fact that I’ve received daily Rightmove alerts for the past eight years and it’s inevitable that sometimes I’ll end up viewing a property I have very little practical chance of buying.
So it went a couple of weeks ago. The place seemed a kind of bricks-and-mortar unicorn: well-proportioned, original coving, on a nice street close to the park. It was totally liveable while also containing at least one wall that could be taken down, and therefore the perfect level of doer-upper to my taste. Of course, the reality was a mess of ceilings stippled with Artex and a heating system that would have needed a full replacement – and don’t even get me started on the windows.
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