Since moving into my first shared student house in Nottingham 20 years ago, I’ve pretty much always lived in a building at least 100 years old.  That’s eight buildings in total and in almost all of them, I’ve seen first hand (and often contributed to) the effect of slapping another coat of paint on.  Sash windows sealed solidly shut and skirting detail smoothed into indistinct blandness from multiple applications of once-white, but now yellowing, Dulux High Gloss.  I’m certainly not critical of this approach.  In the age old clash between the two great schools of DIY philosophy, ‘a job properly done’ versus ‘life’s too short’, I have historically come down in favour of the latter.  After all, another coat of paint is better than no paint; it still preserves.  Also, I think I’ve always been fairly confident that eventually someone would come along and do the thing properly.  Someone in their early 40s perhaps, armed with an orbital sander and an inexplicable enthusiasm.  Someone like….well, me as it happens.

I wouldn’t say that every surface in the house has been stripped completely back, but certainly all the windows whose glazing bars had become gunked up with paint have been given the full treatment.  They are such a faff to paint anyway that the added work of preparing them properly first didn’t seem too arduous.  Also, all the doors were taken off their hinges and sanded prior to painting and all the iron-mongery was removed, stripped of paint, cleaned, restored and replaced.  A wire brush drill attachment is a wonderful tool for this and it’s such a satisfying job.  It is also probably easier than buying new ironmongery because the existing hinges and rim-locks are not only excellent quality and authentic, they’re also calibrated to the doors and frames that they have become used to over the last couple of hundred years.  This means that they can be refitted without any adjustments and they also make an important contribution to the aesthetics of age that I have been consistently championing throughout this restoration.  You may think that an original hinge or door handle wouldn’t make much difference visually, but given that there are two of each on every door in the house, the effect soon adds up.

Perhaps the most satisfying part of the whole restoration though has been the repair and construction of various window shutters.  In the early stages, we had a professional joinery company make some shutters for the main bedrooms we were using at the time.  They did a pretty good job but it was very expensive.  At the same time, a friend donated some salvaged shutters to us that had rotten ends and various other bits of damage.  From these, I was able to trim one of the panels back to good wood, scarf in some extra pieces and make a perfectly good simple shutter for a narrow little window in Lucy’s bedroom.

More recently, my oldest boys wanted to move up to the top floor so they could have a room each and I was experimenting with the idea of restoring some more of the salvaged shutters for these rooms, when my neighbour suggested I make some out of plywood.  This was an ingenious idea.  It involved accurately measuring and cutting strips of plywood, gluing and clamping them, routing out rebates and gluing in decorative beading, attaching hinges and handles (some from the salvaged shutters) and hey presto, beautiful and functional shutters that really complete the original windows and saved me a huge stash of cash as well.  I was so happy with them I carried right on and made some for the lounge as well.