Patrick and Louise Menary extended and refurbished their 1830s semi-detached family home out of necessity; there was a damp problem and they needed more space. What they didn’t realise was that they’d catch a bug – the self-build bug that is! Less than two years after having moved back into their house, they’re already hungry for more…
“The house became too small for us, the children started getting older and the main living area was overrun with toys!,” says Louise. “We originally thought of selling up but that was at a time when the property market was crashing. We also got some feedback from prospective buyers, they wanted an extra living area and a second bathroom, so we decided not to bother moving.” Despite the lack of space, they let their ideas gestate over a period of time. “We were thinking about it for a while before I was happy to go ahead with it. Patrick was saying ‘let’s just extend’ but I didn’t want to take the plunge until we knew exactly what we wanted,” she adds. “I have a passion for interior magazines and I didn’t commit until I found the picture that inspired me to do it! It was an article featuring a house with a split level design, and it crystallised the entire concept I had in my mind. Then I told Patrick ‘let’s do it!’” The extension was built into the garden, which sloped down, meaning that there would be a difference in level in the house. This offered an elegant way of incorporating the fall in the design.
Class act
Magazines were one source of inspiration, but so were fellow self-builders. “We asked around for advice from people who had done work on a period home before,” she says. “We wanted to make sure the renovation would be sympathetic to the design. And then our architect came up with the idea of putting cedar cladding at the back” she says. “It took some convincing – I wasn’t sure about it at all!” Louise and Patrick were more in tune with the historical character of their house and thought something perhaps more classical would suit. In the end, they decided to trust him. “Since we wanted sliding folding doors anyway, we agreed that the cedar would be able to bring the old and new together. So we took a leap of faith and it paid off” The Menarys refurbished the 1830s house at the same time as the extension because it was suffering from an unidentified source of water ingress. “There was damp running all the way up to the eaves, so we stripped everything back to the bare bones, redid the dormer window and stripped out all the floors. On the ground floor we went down three feet to reach the existing floor level and replaced it all with solid timber.” It wasn’t until they tackled the plasterwork on the walls that they realised where the main problem lay. “When one of the previous owners decided to knock down the wall between the sitting room and the drawing room they never sealed the chimney properly,” she says. “They even left an ancient stove inside it! This was the main source of damp; we were happy to find it wasn’t sinister and most importantly, not permanent! We stripped it all back to the bare brick.” The other source of damp, leaky guttering, was thankfully also straightforward to remedy.
