After 8 years of renting a typically draughty old Victorian mid-terrace house close to the award winning beach in Weymouth’s Park District, we decided to buy our own house.

For years Janne, my Danish ex-partner and mother of our two boys, Vic and Fred, had helpfully extolled the amazing benefits of Danish domesticity which include draught-free warm spaces year-round, lots of natural light and the achievement of a state of “hygge“.

Consequently I knew that if we sold our old flat in London and used the money to buy our own place in Weymouth it might not suffice to merely supplant the family to a similarly dark and leaky abode.

Something well insulated and near where we lived seemed to be the brief…but this part of Weymouth, although typical of large areas of other UK towns, contained predominantly old houses, many still unmodernised.

      The Brief

• Close to the beach and town centre
• Draught-free year-round
• Modernised
• Good natural light
• Four bedrooms
• Large amounts of hygge

Then an estate agent showed me an unoccupied wreck of a house that had been kitted out as a cannabis factory. The reclusive owner had died and his brother was selling it. It was in a terrible state having been empty for over a year with holes in the roof, a pond in the dining room causing damp in the next door neighbour’s dining room, a jungle for a garden and a loft full of rat poo and poison. Scary stuff!

However, something screamed “Perfect!” to me. After a lifetime of steadfast DIY avoidance I decided to put an offer in on the spot without even telling Janne. I arranged for her to get a tour on her own later that day in the gloom of the late December afternoon whilst I took the boys to their swimming lessons feeling a little anxious.

When Janne got home she put the kettle on and turned to me.

“Well, what do you think?” I said.

“I think it is a complete mess but it could be a really nice house if someone did it up. It’s a nice road, ideal location and south facing at the rear”. She said.

“Good, it’s ours, our offer has been accepted”. I said, relieved.

Janne looked totally confused for about two or three seconds, then asked “How is it ours?”.

I told her I’d made an offer earlier in the day and it had already been accepted.  I explained that I thought we could use the money from the flat to renovate it and get some help from two friends who knew a lot more about re-building houses than we did. I was hugely relieved that she could see the same potential in the place because, as you can see in the video of my very first time in the house with Andrew the estate agent, it wasn’t a small job at all.

Jason

Contact: jason @ weyforward.net