Facing the complete renovation of a three-storey Edwardian house with a just-born baby to look after is daunting enough – finding out you’re expecting another halfway through is a whole other proposition entirely. But for Simon (aka Cookie) and Sophia Cook, knowing their labours would result in a forever home to raise their children, the work was worth it. Here, they reflect on the high and lows of the renovation and what, for them, makes a good family home.
Sophia: “I’m starting to go down the Instagram hole of looking at other peoples’ houses, and theyre all great and brilliant. But it can sometimes become a very sterile catalogue and I look at people like, ‘Youve got kids and your rooms all white… how do you manage that? Are you some kind of wizard?!’
“We’d rather something lasted a pretty long time and that’s why weve invested so much into this house, because hopefully the kids will be using it one day, or theyll only just be taking it over when were old.”
Simon: “When we first started searching for a house, we were looking for a doer-upper, but then we got cold feet because our first baby was due and we weren’t sure about living on a building site with a new-born. We found a period house in Norbury and put an offer in.”
Sophia: “I knew something wasn’t right though, because Simon kept on looking. One day, which happened to be my birthday, he said, ‘Is there any chance we could go and see this house?’ I looked online and saw it was a complete tip, but I just went along with it.
“Walking around the house, you could see the potential. It had original William Morris wallpaper in the hallway, original cornicing, fireplaces and doors – it was beautiful in that sense. But it also hadn’t been touched since the 1970s – it was just awful, and I was six months pregnant at the time.
“After three or four goes, our offer was accepted. Everyone kept saying, ‘Don’t worry, it’s a probate sale, you’ll be in there in no time’. We moved in when Alfred, our first son, was two weeks old…”
Simon: “It needed so much work. We had to strip everything out that wasn’t original and start again, pretty much. We had quite a strong identity of what we wanted, which was something comfortable, that reflected our personalities and wasn’t too highly polished.”
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发表于 2020-8-4 08:19:04
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