‘THE HOUSE HAD SO MUCH

d so much POTENTIAL’

SPACE SWAP

‘This used to be our bedroom. We knocked down the wall to make an open kitchen-living area – it’s the best decision we’ve made’ Rachel’s home was a poorly configured, dilapidated shell. Fortunately she had the creativity and courage to give it a glorious overhaul

We’d been living in Newcastle before deciding to move to Hexham in search of a renovation project, as Gareth had just got a job in Carlisle and wanted a faster commute,’ says Rachel. ‘We initially searched online for threebedroom properties and had no luck. But when we changed our criteria to one-bed, that’s when we found this place. We knew there was potential to create more bedrooms because of the various lean-to extensions that looked exploitable.

The house was a blank canvas which hadn’t been lived in for more than 10 years. The main living room was very dark and I knew that knocking through to bring in more light was key to our renovation.

Cautious planning

We moved just two days before Christmas 2016. We decided to live in the house for six months before making any changes, and I’m glad we did, because I had a totally different vision initially than what we ended up with. However, it was a very cold Christmas! The fireplace was condemned and we slept on an airbed in the living room thinking, what have we done? Thank God it’s a distant memory now. Living in the existing space made us realise that the lean-to would definitely work as bedrooms, leaving the main house to be an open-plan space. The back of the house had the best views so it made more sense putting the kitchen there and it would cost us less money in structural works. I wanted to retain as much character as possible by keeping the stone walls and wooden beams.

Starting point

The first big project was to knock down the old lean-to extension and rebuild it

GOOD LOOKS

‘The kitchen is my take on a more pricey design that I fell in love with’

to create the bedrooms. It was originally one big room with windows all round and a leaking, droopy plastic roof. It had been very poorly built, and we had all sorts of birds and frogs coming into the house all the time. Eventually it would be a place that we could escape to while the rest of the house was getting done. We were quite fortunate not to have any problems with planning because the lean-to had been there for more than 10 years. The original builder built it smaller than what was actually permitted, so we were able to go bigger, which was a nice bonus.

‘CONSIDER SWAPPING ROOMS AROUND – WE DID AND BY MAKING THIS SPACE THE KITCHEN IT’S BROUGHT IN MORE LIGHT AND OPENED UP THE VIEWS’

A good team

Building work started in January 2018 and there was no access to our house for a couple of months because of bad weather, so it was open to the snow and rain for a while which was worrying. But once we got started our builder was full of good advice. He explained what size windows and doors we should get, what style would work best, and where to have the doors opening. We were going to install more windows, but he reminded us to consider what the house would look like externally and to think about its symmetry. It was difficult to get workmen in, as we’re located in a rural area, so we count ourselves lucky to have found him!

Change of plan

We were expecting our daughter Beitidh in October 2019 so that really made us focus and get as much of the rest of the house sorted as possible. Before going for an open-plan design we thought about incorporating roof lights to make the