carpenters and electricians

Kevin the carpenter came and replaced the doorframe. Turned out our old one, pictured here, was smaller than the gap which had been filled with screwed up paper and bits and pieces. At the moment our bathroom has no door!

Nick the electrician came and he and Dan planned what needed wiring in. We've done a lot of the cable-laying ourselves which included taking up the carpet in the lounge to get it under all the floorboards. Who knew the bathroom would take over the entire house?

 We've also had to drill through a few walls to fit cables. Sadly our 30+ year old drill met it's end as this cartoon by Dan shows...

So. Now we have a bathroom with no tiles, no ceiling, no bath, no sink, no door and a bunch of cables which aren't connected to anything.

getting it all off

With demolition fully underway, Mark and Dee came round armed with hammers, chisels and crowbars to help rid the bathroom of it's peachy tiles and pine ceiling.

With the bathroom bare but usable, the next thing on the to-do list was to remove all the plaster to expose the damp breeze blocks so that they could dry out.

It's harder than it looks!

Many hours of chipping away at the bathroom walls have taught me that if I'm ever in prison, I can't rely on my chiselling abilities to tunnel out. 

getting stuck in

This summer we've started our first big house project. Operation bathroom.

Here it is in all it's estate agent photographic glory. It's a shame they didn't photograph the ceiling. It was a "delightful" pine-panelled sauna-style offering. They did well with the lighting here. The suite is a tasteful peach colour.

It wasn't ever really our plan to do the bathroom first, largely because we don't really have a plan. Unless you can call a cloud of random ideas of what we'd like to do with this place a plan? No?

But the tiles started to come away from the wall.
The lino was showing signs of mould.
The pipes revealed that they'd been fitted with an uphill journey out of the bathroom, so the bath and sink both struggled to drain. You can sort of see that in the photo above if you look at the lower pipe to the right of the bath.

It wasn't our decision any more. The bathroom had spoken.

We're pretty clueless about house renovations so obviously we decided the best way forward would be to do the job ourselves. How hard can it be?

So Dan started to take the tiles off the wall. It's wet under there. Really wet.

Progress was pretty quick at the start. Turns out demolition is fairly speedy and quite fun.

fishy business

In our local pub, there's a photograph framed by the bar. It shows a local fish shop which was next door to the pub on High Town Road for around 65 years until sometime during the 1950s.

from Were You Also Being Served?
by R Norman

I've been searching for the image ever since.

Because in it's later life, this fish shop was Warwick's Fish Restaurant.

I had no idea that the family I married into had local roots. We don't know if there's any connection but it turns out that the owner of Warwick's Fish Restaurant was a Mr Frederick George Warwick and Frederick is definitely a Warwick family name.

This particular Fred lived in Luton and bought the fish restaurant on High Town Road in 1920. He had three fish shops in Luton, on High Town Road, Park St and Chapel St, as well as some in Watford, Harpenden, Fleetville, Dunstable and St Albans where he served as mayor in 1933.

There's three pages about the Warwicks and their fish business in Were You Also Being Served? - the second of two great local history books by Bob Norman. My dad found them when looking for information about the owners of our house.

hidden gems

Just before we moved in to the house, we spent a chilly Sunday here waiting for a fridge freezer to be delivered. New neighbours Amy & Steven popped round and we explored the house together.

We discovered that this house had more to offer than we first realised. If you lean on the radiators, special gifts fall out below!

Upstairs in the bedroom was a local newspaper from the 1990s.

Downstairs, the radiator near the front door hid a small magnetic character toy and two pink magic wands which made a noise. Sadly, while the noise still worked, the magic seemed to have worn off so they found their way to the bin soon enough.

Since then, other radiators have delivered these cars:

Our recent adventures beneath the floorboards also revealed several cans and cigarette packets as well as these delights:

Who knows what else lies in store?

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a bit of history

Recently I discovered our house is part of one of Luton's conservation areas, being one of the town's earliest suburbs. That means there's historical interest in the area and we'll need to apply for permission for external work on the house if we want to do any.

We don't have much information but the Bedfordshire community archives do list our house and a bit of it's story.

The north side of Havelock Road between High Town Road and Wenlock Street was demolished during the redevelopment of HighTown in the mid 20th century. The buildings on the south side remain and give a good idea of the way the area must have looked during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly numbers 11 to 21 with their distinctive arched windows.

The archive also lists, where known, the owner and occupier of the houses. The earliest known occupier of our house is George Newton Barton in 1890. The records don't include his occupation but his neighbours were James Wooding, a grocer, and Thomas & Emma Palmer who lived at 7 & 9 and are both listed as straw hat manufacturers - Luton's biggest trade.

In 1925 the property is listed as being owned by Joseph John Coleman, who owned 11-19. Ours was occupied by Elizabeth Fenn who stayed until at least 1950. We don't know anything about these two but it's likely Joseph Coleman was in the hat trade and Ms Fenn was one of his workers. The records in 1960 show that a Mrs M Lucas occupied it until 1972 and M Mallen was here until 1975 when the property was recorded as vacant.

I love finding these little glimpses of what life was like round here before our time. It'd be nice to know more of the story, but for now we'll just have to make it up to fill the gaps!

skateboarding with my rangemaster

When we moved in, the house was ready to live in - we were specifically looking for a house that was liveable so we could do the work as we could afford it. But there was one thing that didn't work. The cooker. Well, the gas supply to the kitchen actually.

For three months, we became experts at cooking with a slow cooker, a George Forman grill and a halogen oven. We fed 8 people on more than one occasion armed with these gadgets.



After a bit of ebay hunting, we found ourselves a bargain. A Rangemaster with 4 gas hobs and a wok burner on top of an electric grill and two fan assisted ovens. Not new, but refurbished.

It was delivered one Saturday lunchtime, all wrapped in shrinkwrap.

So I decided to refit the kitchen all by myself while Dan was at work. Step 1: remove cupboard.

Step 2: Remove all the random items lurking behind the cupboard. (This scene is particularly disturbing for anyone who's seen Dexter series 1)

Step 3: Take down wall cupboard. This was harder than I'd hoped as there was a secret screw that took me ages to find.

Step 4: Manouevre oven into place. This involved finding Dan's old skateboard in the loft, putting it in the kitchen which is a step lower than the lounge, and then shuffling the oven off the step and onto the skateboard. We then wheeled together down the length of the kitchen until I discovered we were facing the wrong way and had to perform a three-point-turn with oven on skateboard to get it into place.

Dan wired in the electric bits when he got home from work.
The plumber came the next day to reconnect the gas to the kitchen with a new, non-leaky pipe.
Just in time to serve up roast lamb for Mother's Day.

The old oven made it's way to the street just outside our house where the magic High Town scrap fairies took it away around 7am the following day.

baby it's cold inside

We picked up the keys to our house, all eager to get in and start to make it our own.

December was cold.
Really cold.

The house had been empty for a while so the gas had been shut off.
Turned out the pay as you go meters for gas and electricity both had large debts on them.

Quick calls to the suppliers and the accounts were reset and a gas engineer on his way.
Mum bought a cheap kettle and we scrubbed everything in the bathroom and kitchen in a dual attempt to get warm and get the house clean.
I headed to the Scandinavian Cafe for cups of tea.

Bad news though.
The engineer couldn't reconnect our gas because the system had a significant leak.

Back to the flat - our rental had a week overlap from completion date to give us time to get packed and out.
And to call every plumber in Luton.
Mostly they were busy.

Tony came on the day we moved.
(With proper removal people because we're grown ups now and a third floor flat involves a LOT of stairs)
But he couldn't reconnect it that day either.

We moved all our stuff in but spent our first night as homeowners at Mum & Dad's.

Pipes were bought.
The carpet was pulled up.
Floorboards moved.
The heating was reconnected but the gas supply to the kitchen was shut off.

For now...

stripes and chandeliers

Having had our offer accepted in August, it took until December to get everything sorted and in place for the house to be officially ours. Here it is, with photos borrowed from the estate agent listing.

The outside. Ours is the one behind the blue car (which isn't ours) with the black arches over the windows and door. Just out of shot, to the right, is a fish and chip shop and to the left is a pub. 

The lounge, looking from the front door to the kitchen. Check out the carpet...

... and again but with a clearer view of the arches and painted brick fireplace

The lounge from the other end. Can you see the purple glass chandeliers?

The kitchen. It's long and narrow and covered in tiles!

Little bathroom at the end of the kitchen. Yes, a downstairs bathroom. Just like we wanted.

Bedroom 1. This is the front of the house so it's wider than downstairs because it goes over the alleyway. Just peeping in at the top of the picture you can see another chandelier. Green this time. Mmmmmm.

The other side of bedroom 1, with it's fitted wardrobes placed resolutely in front of the alcove cupboard. Smart work. Recognise the carpet? 

Bedroom 2, with it's lovely little fireplace. More carpet. 

Bedroom 3, long and narrow like the kitchen below, with more carpet and more of those curtains. Who thought that was a good idea? Stripy carpet, stripy curtains in a different colour and a garish glass chandelier in every room.

so we bought it

 Inspired by Jess at The Teaspoon House, I've decided to revive this old blog to document our house adventures. To start with, a few posts to update the back story.

We moved to Luton in August 2013. London was lovely but so expensive and we knew that while we could afford to live there, saving would be a challenge and even if we did save for a deposit we'd never be able to afford to buy a house there. Time to move on and Luton seemed to be the place. Hightown, more specifically. We rented for a while until my job looked like it was going to change and we asked my parents to lend us some money for a deposit. As it happens, my parents are incredibly generous and gave us the deposit leaving us ready to go house hunting.

Rightmove became my homepage. Many agencies later, we'd seen houses on most of the streets of Hightown. By then I had a list of things I wanted in a house.

- it had to have a front garden. I didn't want to come off the street straight to the front door.
- it had to have a hallway. Similarly I didn't want to step through the front door straight into the lounge.
- an upstairs bathroom. Why would you want to traipse all the way through the entire house to go to the toilet in the middle of the night.
- two separate rooms downstairs rather than a through-room

We also wanted three bedrooms because we've got too many musical instruments to stash them in a corner now, and we like to be hospitable. With our budget, we had a few options and we met plenty of estate agents who attempted to widen our area and sell us something outside Hightown. No.

Anyway, I popped into an agent near my office one afternoon and he gave me a bunch of papers for various houses. Filtering out those which weren't in Hightown, we were left with three or four, including one which was above our price range and went against all my criteria for a house. Apart from location. I booked a viewing, much to Dan's annoyance - why bother looking if we can't afford it and it doesn't meet our requirements?

It was a funny little house. Ex-rental and in surprisingly good condition having been done up for sale. "Done up" is stretching it a little - a new carpet that fell off the back of a lorry and as much gloss paint as they could slosh around the place. But it had that feeling. You know? That "this is my house" feeling.

So we bought it.