The diary of a renovation: Chapter 1, We’ve found it!

Dream home…

It was a beautiful late summer’s day in 2022. The market was still at its height, fuelled by the rush to the countryside following the pandemic, - and Liz Truss had not yet done her worst. I travelled down to our favourite village in Dorset for the third time in as many months to view Goose Green. What a funny name, we thought - anything to do with the Falklands?

Renovation project

It was advertised as a bit of a project, just what we wanted, and was sure to attract lots of attention: a quintessential country village, replete with history, en route to nowhere and surrounded by bucolic landscapes, including an ancient and famous chalk giant that once upon a time featured on the Simpsons!

Earlier that year we had decided that we had been together long enough (over eight years) to know we were happy with our arrangement, and that the time was right to move into a house that we could make ours as a couple. Both of us were divorced and this decision marked a point in our lives where we could put the past firmly behind us. We focussed our search on Dorset as we both love it: Richard, my partner grew up there and I have fond memories of working in Dorchester for a few years in the twenty teens.

Nothing thus far had made both of us say that ‘this is the one’ - the situation was perhaps too remote, a village had a busy main road running through it or (with one at least) the sight of rats running through the house was a step too far!

Huge garden!

But Goose Green was different. It was just me who made the initial visit, so I filmed a couple of videos to send back to Richard. The very fact that I was moved to film the house and its garden was a departure; this hadn’t happened before. “Wow this is amazing, this house, and just look at the garden!” I said on film, and I gabbled on and on like it was already ours.

Looking back at my video, I realise how much more solid the house looked than it eventually turned out to be…but more on that in future blogs! The agents told me that it would probably take £150-£200k to do up. This would be doable if we achieved what the agents back home said our Stockbridge house was worth. Richard was captivated by enthusiastic descriptions on my videos, and came down to visit a couple of days later.

And he loved it as much as I did. Especially the large, sunny garden, unusual for a village centre property. Although the house is smaller than the one we were living in, the garden is two or three times the size and a marvellously blank canvas. It turns out Goose Green had been empty since around 2013 and so while the bones of the garden were evident, it was totally overrun with ground elder and bindweed and in need some serious attention. Richard loves gardening and I love the thought of it (my mother is an expert plantswoman and landscape designer, and I keep hoping that some of her talent will rub off on me before too long!).

We learned that Goose Green was named for the patch of green outside the front of the house where live poultry was bought and sold in days gone by. We also discovered that the house had been the site of ‘Mrs Alice Earwaker’s Refreshment Rooms’ until September 1919, the date that the village, until then owned by the Pitt-Rivers estate, was put on the open market following the Great War. We were captivated by the thought of countless people having found refreshment in this pretty Georgian house, and felt certain that it would give us and our family that gift too.

And so it was, we both fell for this ramshackle cottage with the huge garden. We had found our perfect home, one that we both could imagine ourselves bringing back to life and living in, and in a village where we already felt we belonged. We decided to put in an offer.

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