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The internet provides a new way of help for old homes
Old homes have great character, but they throw up no end of problems. Can a new online service help?
Most of us have a few cracks or the odd damp patch; Helen and Tom Kenyon have a whole house of problems. Their two-bedroom, 18th-century thatched cottage in rural Wiltshire, surrounded by a wild garden with ancient apple trees and hens clucking in the long grass, is in dire need of renovation.
They bought it three years ago after the old lady who had lived there all her life died. “Inside, it was ghastly – horrendously damp and freezing,” Helen says. “The window frames were rotting and there were 12 different strips of wallpaper in the sitting room.” Yet the fireplace, the window seats, the narrow wooden staircase and the bucolic position on a gentle slope with views down the valley were everything they’d dreamt of. “We fell completely in love with it,” Helen says. “We are incredibly happy here.”
The house still needs a lot of work: it has a 1950s kitchen and no central heating. And the couple, who started renovating it themselves, reckon they need 10in of thermal insulation in the loft, but believe the resulting lack of air circulation could rot the thatch. What should they do?
Nearly one in four people in England live in homes that were built before 1919, according to the English House Condition Survey of 2003, and 8.5m homes in the UK were built before 1945. We love their original tiled floors, exposed beams, stained-glass panes, even the bowed ceilings – but, once we have fallen for the sash windows and the inglenook, and parted with a lot more cash than we would have done for the equivalent space in a newer home, do we know how to look after our most valuable asset when things go wrong?
“The main mistake people make with old houses is expecting them to behave like new ones,” says Robert Hill, a chartered surveyor by training and the man behind HBAS. “
With the backing of the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, which is regulating the site, Hill, 56, has amassed a team of experts to answer questions from owners of everything from listed barns to 1930s bungalows.
For an annual subscription of £55, homeowners will receive answers to two questions (however much research is involved), a growing list of frequently asked questions and case histories, e-newsletters and, should you need to ask more than two questions, e-mail access to specialists for a fee (from £37 upwards, depending on the question). Site visits can be arranged at £75 an hour.
Not everyone is convinced by the push-button solution. “I don’t think there’s any substitute to going out to look at a problem,” says David Mills, of the Bath-based independent building surveyors DR Mills and Associates. “If you were ill, you wouldn’t want to be diagnosed via a website.”
Damp patches and cracks fixed, but stuck on how to do the place up? Keep it simple and white, or splash out on this season’s floral-print wallpaper? Go to mydeco.com, where you can upload a photograph of the room you’re working on, drop in your new ideas over the current walls and see how it will look. The website, launched by the founders of lastminute.com, also provides a “try before you buy” service, offering tips from designers that cover most budgets and styles, and 3-D tools for creating a digital plan of a room. By selecting an interior or exterior job from a dropdown menu, for example, you can move a door, replace a staircase or change the kitchen worktop. The site will give you a full breakdown of the likely cost.
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