It’s just over five months since Kristin and I moved into this house, in early March this year. We got the keys on 27 October 2023, six months after our offer was accepted.

Back in March 2023 we had had the obligatory initial snoop as we looked around for a house. We put the offer in, it was accepted. We had surveys done. We got the surveys back. The surveys raised points and questions about the house. We asked questions. We had some more surveys done. We haggled with the seller about the price. We had A Budget, after all. In April we all agreed this was enough back and forth.

The guy selling had lived there since the early 70s, at the soonest. We’ve presumed it was a council house as the house’s paperwork shows he’d eventually buy the house from the council through Right to Buy in the early 80s. He’d barely invested in the house over the last 20 or so years, maybe even 30, aside from the odd lick of paint (slapped over existing layers of paint). Most of the house seemed problematic — but the core of it seemed sound. Everything else… 

A dampness hung in the air of every room. The walls felt soft when you touched them, almost organic, moving in a little when pressed. The carpets were threadbare, worn down so they looked like massive hessian sacks covering the floor. The guy was a relentless smoker, the smell permanently in the air, stains everywhere, on the walls, on door frames, on ceilings. The electrical wiring was in dire need of being totally replaced. The window frames were more putty than wood. I could go on writing a list here. We made lists of everything that needed doing. It felt like lists of every thing.

Our initial intended outcome for a good enough home was one: Safe for us to live in when we moved in. This had a number of acceptance criteria: warm inside when cold outside, secure at night, and so on. We used the lists to evaluate:

1. What do we really need to do to the house so we could live in it.
2. What would we do after that — and as far as we knew, in what order.
3. Does it make sense to buy this house?

1 and 2 in that list weren’t so straightforward. 1 was what was essential, absolutely the minimum we needed. Everything else basically went into the other list. There was a lot of back of forth between them as we ruthlessly thought about what was essential. And then we’d go through the list of essentials and work out how each could and would be done. Could we do it? What couldn’t we do? What could we do if we took some time to learn — and have the time to do it. How much money and time would it take for someone else to do these things? How much money and time would it take us to do these things?

Against all this we had three constraints:

1. A limited pot of our own money to buy materials and other people’s time/skills.
2. Our own time to do things. We both had full time roles, roles that usually stretched beyond the “expected 37.5 hours”, early morning starts, longer days, even late evening meetings.
3. We could pay to rent the house we lived in for 3, maybe 4 months while the new house was being worked on — but we could only pay rent on one house and the mortgage payments on the other for that limited amount of time. This would set us a hard deadline to have the new house done. 

We were pretty quick to work out things we needed others to do. The walls and ceilings: We could take the plaster and tiles off, but we needed others to do the new plastering (it’s a time sink). Completely rewiring the house. Down and down the lists we went. Wherever we drew the line between essential and not so essential, whatever pots we put things we were aware if we took the house on there would be a lot to do at the start and a lot to do later on.

But our discovery work took us only so far. What we did know: We felt we could do this.

In early October we agreed a moving in date, end of the month we had the keys. We had until early March to get the house ready.

Then we got into the house. Once you’re in the environment having a proper look and sort the work, that’s when the reality ups. Our essentials were looked stacked, almost overflowing. Our idea of what we had roughly planned before we moved in was being reshaped, in some ways radically.

We were told there was “internet access”, but we found there wasn’t actually a cable as someone had cut it.

After a couple of weeks of being in the house we found out the gas fire in the living room was leaking gas; It’ll need to be… sorted, somehow.

When the carpets were lifted we found the floorboards needed a bit of work — and the boards were an awkward size so needed cutting.

Our hope half the walls didn’t need rebuilding was a hope. As we looked and talked it through in detail with people who knew a lot about walls it was clear pretty much all the walls needed doing.

Half the radiators were borked: We’d need new radiators and get them installed, which means reallocating money and finding someone reliable to put them in. That money would come from the kitchen pot, meaning…

…we’d have to install the kitchen ourselves. We’d have to learn how to do this and then do it. This would put a large stress on us. We looked into could we do this. Theory and practice are linked. I felt I had enough practice in similar work to be able to do kitchen cabinets. So we looked at the kitchen in a different way than it being complete. We looked at what would be good enough for us to move in with, especially given our limits in time and skills. What would good enough be, a kitchen we could work with when we moved in and then look at improvements later. We needed to tread a careful line here: We didn’t want to reengineer the kitchen too much further down the line — but we didn’t have time to massively engineer it now. We explored layouts of the kitchen using cardboard boxes and tape, trying to imagine the space being used, role playing. What would be a good starting point for the kitchen, what could we use in some spaces temporarily (short term or longer term). Getting the plumbing moved about now before we put loads of cabinets in: Worth that little bit of time now as it sets us up for the future. Getting and putting up all the wall cabinets? We could get some (not all) and they could go up after we’ve moved in. The rest can happen later.

The bathroom was similar. Originally we thought as a stretch we could get the bathroom furniture replaced while the other work was going on. It’d be nice. As our money needed to be redistributed on things we felt were a higher priority we reworked our intentions. A new bathroom wasn’t essential, this stuff worked. What could we do with what was in the bathroom already. What we needed was a bath/shower that doesn’t leak, a shower decent enough for us to use normally, and we work on the ventilation now so we don’t have to deal with mould later. I ended up doing the DIY equivalent of a late night spreadsheet: tiling, after watching some YouTube videos.

There was so much more, so so much more. And we was ruthless. We had to be. Every thing that popped up, small or big, we conferred and agreed what we’d do. There was no room for bloated scope. If we needed more money… we just couldn’t. If we needed more time… we just couldn’t. Our good enough home was ready about 4 days before we moved in. Those skirting boards in the kitchen I hadn’t put in yet? Not essential. Having all the doors rehung? Not essential. Painting the hallway? Not essential (although the other rooms were). Them and more for the long list.

Another side to this: We wasn’t even living in the house yet. We knew there would be yet more stuff to do to the house when we got in: We had the other long list of things to do later. But we were also learning more as we did this initial design and build. More stuff got added to that long list. Some things we found we maybe didn’t need to do. A couple of things from that longer list got ticked off before we moved in. (I’d learned removing gas pipes is something anyone can do if the pipes aren’t hooked up to a gas source, so 2 hours of work helped clear a space much sooner than planned.) We even moved the order about. “This work needs to happen in summer as the conditions are best suited…” That sort of thing.

None of this is new though. It’s the third house I’ve bought. The third house I’ve gone through this stuff. The third project of this kind. And it’s about the same for any piece of work: There’s always conditions to be mindful of, there’s always constraints to get something working (not perfectly finished). The work is never done, it's just where the lines are drawn. Be ruthless to get on.