September 14th, 2014


After eight months and eight offers on houses, I have finally succeeded in buying a house in the extremely difficult Cambridge market.

The completion was on Friday the 12th. There lies ahead a long period of planning and work on the house. It has a great deal of
unrealised potential, and a large number of maintenance issues. We are expecting that the whole project will take a year to finish,
and I will try to chronicle the project here.

The house is on Gwydir Street in Cambridge. This is a residential street running north from an area of Mill Road with many
ethnic restaurants and shops, Some history of the street can be found here. I especially enjoy the fact that thee was a typhoid
outbreak in 1888, thanks to poor sanitation, and that the area was considered for slum clearance in the 1950s. It's hard to imagine
that today, given what housing prices are like everywhere in Cambridge. This does mean that the houses are being constantly modernised,
and while they continue to have the same appearance in front, many of them are considerably nicer on the inside than they would
appear from the outside.

Here is the front of the house, which is calling out for some greenery. The area behind the stone wall is all concrete, waiting to
be torn up.




Here is the view to the south, towards Mill Road. As one can see, a number of houses have more mature greenery in front.




Here is the view to the north, As one can see, the houses tend to be right on the sidewalk, creating a bit of a
change of character:





The house itself is absolutely typical of its era, except for one unusual feature.

Here is a picture of the entrance hallway. It seems to have been redecorated relatively recently.




Like all houses of this era, there is a sitting room directly off the entrance hallway. The lighting was rather bad
in this picture.




Immediately behind the living room is what would have traditionally been the dining room. Sometimes these
are separate rooms, and sometimes there is an opening between the two rooms. In this case, there are doors
which the previous owner seems to have kept closed. Now that they are open, there is a greater sense of space.
Here we see the view from the living room into the dining room, and the doors to the side of the rear part of
the house.



Here is a picture of part of the dining room, taken from the living room.




Walking past the stairs, through a narrow hallway adjacent to the dining room, comes the kitchen. This
is the unusual part of the house. All of these Victorian houses are essentially a rectangular box in front,
with something tacked on in back, forming an L-shaped space. Usually the kitchen is in back, as it is in
this house. What is unusual about this house is that this bit is 30 feet long. The estate agent representing the
seller speculated that early owners may have ran a business out of the front of the house and lived in the back.
This presents a huge space, with room for dining space in the back of the kitchen, allowing the dining/sitting
room area to be used as proper living space, necessary for a grand piano!





Here is another picture of the kitchen:



As is clear, it is a very narrow but long space. This is even clearer from the outside back view:



and further back:



The major part of the renovation project should entail constructing what is known as a "side return",
essentially extending the kitchen area to use up some of the space to the side. There is no reason to extend
further back, as the back part of the house is already very long. This should provide the opportunity to
get a much better sense of openness to the kitchen and have a flow of space looking out towards the
garden.

Planning permission is often tricky, but we don't expect any problems with this extension project. The back
part of the adjacent house goes back much further, and noone will actually be able to see the hoped for extension
except from our garden.

As long as we're in the garden, let's see what's there now (the ivy in thep icture above is growing over from the
neighbour's yard.) First, this is the very back of the garden, with a small shed on the right. The building to the
left is an annex in the neighbour's yard. The plan is to build a small studio in this space.



Here is a view towards the back. To the right is a reasonably mature border, but there is a lot more that
can be done with the garden space.



Here is an apple tree: apparently they are good cooking apples (but I don't like cooked apples... maybe
time to learn how to make cider?)




And a pear tree, probably inedible:



Finally, a view of the border back towards the house:



and one more, a view towards the north from the garden:



Now it's time to go upstairs:



Here is a bit of the main bedroom. The windows look out over the street. There are cabinet doors next to the
chimney breast, but the space behind them is so shallow they don't seem to be particularly useful. However, they
do hide a multitude of sins, especially water damage and mold.



There is also a builtin wardrobe, which will be usable for the time being:



Here is the second bedroom. The closet space hides some mysterious things, including sunlight coming
from some cracks up into the loft which in turn has some gaps open to the elements. That probably explains
some of the visible water damage.



Here is the view from the second bedroom, facing to the back:



These two bedrooms are above the sitting/dining rooms. If instead one proceeds straight back after the staircase, one
passes first a small bathroom:



This room looks quite new. I suspect that it used to contain the traditional water tank used in british houses, but
the previous owner fairly recently installed a "combi-boiler", which is a small water heater in the kitchen which doesn't
use a tank. It heats water for the radiators. My guess is that after the tank was removed, he converted the room into
a small second bathroom.

Next one passes the main bathroom, quite small. Behind this are two bedrooms. I believe they were originally one,
but the previous owner subdivided them, creating a room he was using as a study. It is quite small though:



The hope is that if a loft conversion is possible to provide an extra bedroom, these
two bedrooms can be restored to one larger room.

Here is a closeup of the broken window:



Most, if not all, of the windows will have to be replaced, as the window frames are quite rotten.

Here is a friend (fortunately, on the outside):



Finally, we move to the back bedroom:



Another view:



I think the back two bedrooms had once been a single room, split up by a light-weight stud wall.
Both of the back rooms are small and not very pleasant. The hope is to significantly improve this space
by combining the two rooms back into one and creating a vaulted ceiling with skylights, and turn this space
into a small library.

There is a small window in the back of the room with a nice view:



But it clearly needs replacing with something bigger:



And a closeup of some mold:



And some water damage above the boiler in the kitchen:



Pretty much everywhere one looks, except the hallway, staircase and the new bathroom, there is work to
be done. Over and above this, the house will be expanded significantly.