It’s amazing how much time I spend just thinking about what to do and how to do it.  This is a listed building so I am limited in the alterations I can make.  It seems that there is a lot of negative feeling towards the listing process and conservation officers but I have to say that my own personal experience has been overwhelmingly positive.  Essentially anyone can buy a house and alter it according to their personal taste, however repulsive that taste might be to the next person to move into that house. That’s OK though because the new owner can always make the alterations that suit them and so the process continues.  What if those alterations involve removing parts of the building itself though?  What if I wanted to take down a wall and replace it with a fish tank? (I most certainly do not wish to do this by the way). The next person would then want to undo this and rebuild the wall only they’d have to use new material.  Before long we’d have the ‘Trigger’s Broom’ scenario (see here if you’re not familiar with British sitcoms of the 80s and 90s…incidentally, this scene was shot in a café 5 mins walk from this house).  That is why owners of listed buildings need to apply for Listed Building Consent for any alterations they wish to make.  It doesn’t mean that they can’t make alterations, it just makes sure they think long and hard about what they are doing and the impact this will have on the heritage value of their building, which can only be a good thing.

I am lucky enough to have a couple of architect friends who specialise in historic buildings and they have given me some very helpful advice about how to approach such a mammoth task.  They advised that in the first instance we should:

• Live in the house to see how it fits our lifestyle
• Make a measured plan of the house and site

In my eagerness to get going, I needed something practical to do so I bought a laser measuring device, measured up every room in the house and produced the following plans. These enabled me to see clearly the layout of the space we had so we could mark up any ideas for changes, such as the rewiring, and accurately assess the impact these would have.  They’d also become useful when applying for Listed Building Consent.