3. Turning our house into a palace
The process of getting our house ready to sell. We have lived here for eleven years (me) and twenty seven years (partner) so this involved over two years of sorting, packing and decorating.
Design framework: Looby Macnamara's design web
Vision, helps, limits, patterns, ideas, principles, integration, action, momentum, appreciation, reflection, pause
Dates
July 2014 - July 2017
There are many things we love about living here - both the house and the neighbourhood. We're close to both the town centre and the countryside. There's a frequent bus route close by, some lovely local shops, our street is quiet and our neighbours are pretty nice. But there are things that frustrate me - the garden is overlooked, there's no room for chickens, and the neighbouring house is rented, so we never really build a relationship with those who live there. Also Peter is a full time musician, and I play flute, and I constantly worry about bothering the people next door.
Back in July 2014, I used Looby Macnamara's design web as a tool to start thinking about this as a design for my portfolio. She writes about the design web in her People and Permaculture book, and there's a quick online explanation from another diploma apprentice here.
In January 2015 we visited a mortgage adviser, and then spent most of 2015, 2016 and the first half of 2017 preparing our house for sale. We found a buyer in July 2017, and finally moved to our new place in February 2018. This design traces the process of using the design web and preparing our house ready to sell.
In this design, the text in grey italics is my reflections in July 2014. The anchor points are in bold green italics.
I want a spacious home, easy to keep clean and tidy, easy to find things, no glaring decorating or maintenance jobs, easy to dance from one room to another, welcoming, easy to have friends around, comfortable, glamourous, where we don't have to shift stuff to find things all the time. I want it to feel private but welcoming. I want to be able to craft and cook and preserve and experiment without having to do a million tidying jobs first. I don't want it to feel grubby, like there's corners I can't go into.
I feel uncomfortable and overlooked in our garden, and I'd quite like to keep chickens, which I can't do here as there is not enough space and the pavement runs right alongside our garden. Therefore, I'd like to consider moving house. However, our house is rather full, there are several decorating jobs that need doing, and some outdoor maintenance work to be done. We would need to complete this work before we could have the house valued, and until we had the house valued we would not be able to consider looking for a new one as we would not know our financial position and what we could afford. Having just paid off our mortgage, we would like to not have to take on another one.
We have a cheerful house! We have plenty of wood, paint and tools. Peter is competent and creative with DIY. We have savings to pay for maintenance jobs and materials. I am pretty determined!
Energy leaks, concerns, emotional ties, things that are pulling us off route... We need to be honest and aware with each other, need to recognise the edge of our comfort zone and some resistance to moving out. It feels like there's a lot of emotion tied up in this. I feel reluctant to change things. Sometimes I think we're both overwhelmed and don't know where to start. Sometimes I feel this place isn't mine to change. We need to work on communication and a shared goal and sense of purpose.
We both want the house to be a palace, to be able to dance from room to room without falling over piles of stuff. We talk about this often but frequently squabble when we talk about practical details. Both of us feel overwhelmed by the mess and amounts of stuff to do. We frequently declare we'll do something about it and then don't. We feel overwhelmed by feeling like everything needs moving before we can do anything, so we never know where to start.
One job always leads to another, and usually takes longer than planned. There's a pattern of putting off difficult jobs until they end up really big. We have had bad experience getting traders in to do things and so are reluctant to do this in the future.
We struggle to separate maintenance, decorating, decluttering. What is the priority? Sometimes I feel I'm best starting and finishing a whole room, but Peter doesn't work like this and then we get dragged into a cycle of emotions again, a spiral of apathy.
We also had an estate agent round to value the house and give advice about how much to do to it. He valued it at approximately £170,000 in the state it was in at the time, and advised we replace the misty double glazing panels downstairs, and plaster the bedroom ceiling.
Option |
Plus |
Minus |
Interesting |
1.
Put it on the market as it is |
* Easiest option * We will hopefully be able to move
quickly |
* Would have to sell as a ‘project’ so
would limit the amount of money we would get for it |
* Many areas unfinished (eg no plaster on bedroom ceiling) * Our decorating style was best
described as ‘quirky’ |
2.
Make some improvements but limit the amount of money spent |
* Could pick and choose what to do – minimum
effort for maximum gain * Could do much of the work ourselves
and develop our skills * Would hopefully increase the sale
price |
* Hard work * How to choose what to do and what to
leave? |
* Would it be worth it? Would we
increase the sale price by more than we spent? |
3.
Redecorate from top to bottom |
* Would be able to increase sale price |
* Wouldn’t necessarily increase sale
price to cover what we spent * This would be a big job so we would likely end up paying others to do some of
it |
* Some people like to put their own
stamp on a house – it would be a waste if they ended up ripping out the
kitchen/bathroom we put in |
Earth care
Making major changes would take resources. As we were trying to maximise the amount of money we got for the house, we would have been unwilling to source more expensive environmentally friendly options. There was also a chance that whoever bought our house would make their own alterations anyway - we had seen instances locally where people had moved in and immediately ripped out what we considered to be a perfectly good kitchen. Option 3 seemed to have the most potential to inspire waste.
People care
We wanted to maximise the amount we sold our house for to give ourselves more options. Peter had bought the house more than 25 years previously, and had therefore already come to the end of the 25 year mortgage. Any money we got for the house we could use as a deposit for the next one.
Fair shares
We wanted to give our future buyers the chance to mould the house to their own liking, which again meant ruling out option 3 (or taking option 3 and accepting there may be considerable waste).
We chose option 2 - making some changes, but ensuring these were relatively inexpensive.
Observe and interact (Holmgren)
We've lived here a long time, and over the years have done various maintenance tasks (for example fixing leaks in the roof) and made small, incremental changes (for example adding a seating area to the garden). We had a good knowledge of the house and its faults, and could anticipate some of the issues we were likely to encounter (for example knowing that plaster was likely to crumble if we removed wallpaper). We had also had plenty of chance to observe ourselves, the way we work, our strengths and weaknesses. We had a good idea of which jobs would be best suited to each of us, and we also knew that it is usually best if we work in separate rooms rather than trying to both do the same job (we both like to be in charge and are bad at taking orders...).
Use and value renewable resources (Holmgren)
We are fortunate to have a small, local hardware shop, and we made great use of this. They'll happily sell us a couple of screws at a time for a specific job, and always ask how things were going. They have two cheerful dogs in the shop too, so we often invent a reason to pop in just to say hello to them.
Peter is good at sourcing second hand materials and furniture, and things found in skips or on Freegle, and we are keen to fix rather than replace wherever possible.
Make the least change for the greatest possible effect (Mollinson)
This principle was the key which guided my planning, and was key to the whole project (I am not entirely sure we achieved it though!)
I wanted to experiment with project planning software which I might also be able to use at work (obtain a yield), so I started to learn how to use ProjectLibre - open source project planning software. The picture below shows a screenshot of my initial efforts, in which I attempted to estimate a duration for each job and assign dependencies.
We pinned a print out of our spreadsheet on the kitchen cupboards and crossed off each job as we did it (and found a few new ones to add to the bottom).
As we got closer to the end, we started viewing houses again. This was fun, and we turned into each trip into a fact-finding mission, investigating the local area as well as the house, and staying out for a cup of tea or lunch. We viewed around twenty houses during this stage, and with each we refined our criteria.
We tried to make each house viewing into a mini-event, having lunch in a cafe, or taking a walk around a new local beauty spot. We also set aside enough money to have regular weekends away to reconnect with each other.
With hindsight it may have been better to plan these times rather than wait until desperation set in...
Once we had decided to move, we never wavered in our decision. However, we have 'added extra detail to our vision' as Looby suggests (p262). My initial design, to turn our house into a palace, grew until it felt unwieldy, covering both decorating our existing house and finding a new one. I reflected on this blog in August 2016 that I was struggling living with the chaos, and we never really found a way to deal with that effectively.
I want a spacious home, easy to keep clean and tidy, easy to find things, no glaring decorating or maintenance jobs, easy to dance from one room to another, welcoming, easy to have friends around, comfortable, glamourous, where we don't have to shift stuff to find things all the time. I want it to feel private but welcoming. I want to be able to craft and cook and preserve and experiment without having to do a million tidying jobs first. I don't want it to feel grubby, like there's corners I can't go into.
Hoping this will lead to a more peaceful home and relationship! Might invite friends round more often, spend far less time looking for things. And I'm hoping we'll eventually be able to at least consider selling even if we don't go through with it.
The potential spirals of erosion I identified near the start did manifest themselves, and the whole process was difficult and stressful for both of us. At times we didn't follow our own plan, and we ended up doing far more to the house than we'd originally intended.
However, we did learn many new skills. I learned to plaster, and saved several hundred pounds by plastering some of the walls in the house - I've since been able to do small plastering jobs for a family member too. We developed a good idea of our own capabilities (and our own boundaries), and we feel we know each other better now (we still won't be working in the same room though).
We used a lot of second hand materials and furniture, and things found in skips or on Freegle, and we did most of the work ourselves by hand. When we did get workers in, they were mostly people we knew running their own business. We fixed rather than replacing where possible - for example we covered the existing mismatched, unsightly kitchen cupboard doors with rolls of sticky-baked plastic.
However, there were some areas where we did not choose the renewable option - we did not buy environmentally friendly paint, for example. As we had decided by that time that we were moving out, we wanted to complete our renovations quickly and cheaply. I'm not entirely comfortable with this decision and would likely make a different one for a house we were staying in ourselves.
With hindsight, it is clear that this was a joint project, but I was designing alone (albeit having done a 'client interview').
The design web was useful, particularly given the strong people care element of the design. It helped us to identify our limits and potential sticking points at the start, and these definitely became apparent throughout the process. We also identified new limits (on our sanity, mostly), as well as new helps (our friends, and the raft of new skills and knowledge we acquired). Reflecting and evaluating at regular intervals encouraged us to celebrate progress as we went along, and to plan in small pauses (from turning house-viewing into a day out, to taking the occasional weekend holiday).
Our yields were great, and include new practical skills, vastly increased knowledge of the local area, knowledge of house buying and selling processes, and I suspect we greatly increased the value of our house, although we'll never know that for sure. These skills will stand us in good stead in our future home. One unexpected (and hard won) yield was a strengthening of our relationship. This has been a tough process for us, but we've learned a lot about ourselves and each other along the way, and feel we're stronger together as a result.
If I was to do a similar design again, I would plan more carefully for the people care elements. Yes we are stronger now, but I wouldn't want to go through this process again in this way. In future I would be more careful to draw the boundaries of the design around something I had control over the implementation of, or to ensure all parties were fully committed to both design and implementation.
I also haven't really addressed the earth care ethic here as much as I would like. We have incorporated second hand and free materials where possible, but for the items we bought new, we made no attempt to buy these from sustainable sources. I notice that I said something similar in my reflections at the end of my garden design - a sign that this is an area I need to focus on in the future.
I did find it hard to write up the design having used the design web. The other frameworks I'd used previously (SADIMET, OBREDIMET) lent themselves more to a linear writing process, whereas the design web was (obviously) less linear. I felt a little confused at times over which stages were observation, which were analysis, and where the decisions and evaluation should sit. Going back and reading Looby's book helped, rather than just relying on the words of the anchor points themselves.
Overall though, we met our initial aim of turning our house into a palace, and feel empowered as a result.