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The money pit

Ahh, home crap home!
– Walter Fielding Jnr (Tom Hanks), The Money Pit, 1986

The Money Pit is a movie about a young couple that buy a house (well, it’s more of a mansion in the movie, but anyway…) for what seems like a reasonable price, only to have the place start to fall apart around them the moment they move in. I mention it not because it’s a great movie (it isn’t), but because of the above quote that unfortunately comes to mind whenever I think about our own house.

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When I first met Paula, I was living in my own two-bedroom flat in Chester, while she was still living with her folks in Blackburn. Once we decided to get a place of our own, we knew we’d have to look further afield than Chester as there was no way we were going to be able to afford the kind of property we wanted otherwise. Our search took us just over the border into Wales, where we managed to buy a four-bedroom detached house (with garage!) for just a little more than I sold my flat for. We moved in at the beginning of April 2003.

And things went downhill from there.

You know when you’re moving to a new place, and you get all excited about it, and you start making plans for what you’re going to do when you move in? Everything seems so straightforward, doesn’t it? Take that wall out to open the room up. Move that doorway over here ’cos it’s not really in the best place. Replace that window with a set of patio doors. And so on.

Then you finally move in, and reality hits. You can’t just “take that wall out” because it’s load-bearing. So you need to get a structural engineer to calculate the size of the steel I-beam needed to support the first-floor joists. Then you have to hire some professionals to take the wall out and put the beam in. But first you need to remove all of the power sockets in the existing wall. Which requires taking-up the floorboards upstairs. Only they’re not your normal floorboards but bloody 8′ x 4′ sheets of ¾” tongue-and-groove plywood. And then you discover that the power cables you need to get at are in the partition wall above where the beam will be going. So you have to take a large chunk out of the plasterboard to get at them. And it’s late, and dark (because the power’s off), and you have to finish things tonight because the builders are coming tomorrow, and you wish you’d never moved in the first damn place.

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There was nothing particularly wrong with our house when we moved in. Sure, there weren’t really enough power sockets, the central heating needed attention, and the internal layout wasn’t the best, but these were problems we figured we could sort out once we moved in. Only I didn’t expect that it would take so long and cost so much money, or that certain jobs would prove to be such a bloody pain in the arse.

I could probably write a book about the ‘fun’ we’ve had making our house the way we want it, but I’d rather not relive some of the things we’ve been through to be honest. Suffice to say, if we had to make the decision again, we wouldn’t buy this particular house. It’s just not worth the hassle.