When we bought the cottage, our solicitor told us that Grade II listed buildings were a commitment, not an investment. We thought we understood what he meant. We understood it in the intellectual sense of knowing that renovation of old buildings takes longer and costs more than renovation of newer ones. We did not understand it in the other sense, which is the sense that matters: the way a very old building has an opinion about what happens to it, and the extent to which your job as an owner is less to impose your ideas on it and more to listen carefully to what it is telling you.
What the house revealed
The first winter, we had the main chimney stack repointed. The mason who did it found, inside the stack, a boot. A child's boot, very old, tucked into a void in the masonry. This is not unusual in old English houses - shoes and other objects were placed in walls and chimneys as apotropaic objects, meant to ward off evil spirits or bring good luck. We know almost nothing about the person who placed it there, or when, or exactly why. We know they lived in this house, were worried about something, and chose this response.
We put the boot back. This seemed correct.
The house has revealed other things: an earlier wall line visible in the sitting room floor when we lifted the 1970s carpet (the room used to be two rooms); a blocked doorway in the kitchen that, when opened, led to a small stone-floored space that was probably a dairy or larder; original wooden window pegs still working behind the replacement casements someone fitted in the 1980s.
The philosophy of slow renovation
There is a version of renovation that treats a house as a problem to be solved. You make a plan, you execute the plan, you achieve a result, you are finished. This version works reasonably well with a 1970s semi-detached in good structural condition. It works very badly with a seventeenth-century building whose structure is idiosyncratic, whose materials are unfamiliar, and whose history leaves surprises in the walls.
The version we have arrived at - through failure as much as design - is slower and more iterative. We do one thing, we let it settle, we see what it reveals, we decide what to do next. We have learned to identify what is actually wrong versus what is just unfamiliar. The lime plaster walls looked shocking to us when we moved in because they had a texture and warmth that looked to modern eyes like disrepair. They were not in disrepair. They were doing their job, which is to let the building breathe, and covering them with modern gypsum plaster would have been a genuine mistake.
What is not finished
The kitchen is not finished. We know roughly what it will be - a mix of old and new, fitted and freestanding, lime-washed walls and a proper larder - but we have not done it yet because we are not sure we are ready to make those decisions permanently. The bathroom in the main bedroom needs replacing. The back garden is, essentially, a field that we mow.
The sitting room, on the other hand, is very nearly right. The fireplace is open and working. The floor is flagstone where it always was and oak boards where it was not. The walls are lime-plastered and painted in a warm off-white that is close to what they might once have been. When you sit in it in winter with a fire going, it feels like itself. That feeling is what we are working towards, room by room, slowly.