Big is beautiful

Above: The roll-top bath

Above: Rosemary's bedroom

Above: The south-facing Snug Room

Margaret Owen grew up in a pretty cottage near Bishops Frome close to a big old Georgian house at the end of a drive. It had once been a vicarage, then home to a magistrate (the cellar had been a jail) followed by a headmaster. Little did she think that one day she would live in it with her husband Ben and their three children Rosemary (12), William (10) and Pierce (8).

“The strange thing is that because the house WAS so big it made it comparatively cheap,” says Ben. “Eight years ago we were living in a tiny house that had belonged to my grandmother and were looking for a five bedroomed place, prices for which proved to be way out of our reach.”

Then Barrington House came on the market for a very reasonable £300,000. It had 12 bedrooms and just one bathroom which made their mortgage lenders raise their eyebrows (“a very big place for a small family”) but the couple scraped together a deposit and were able to move in during the summer of 2000.

“Luckily it wasn’t listed and had lots of lovely period features such as big sash windows, six-panelled doors and a wonderful oak staircase which had been boarded up,” says Ben. “Also in its favour was that it had fairly recently been rewired and had new oil-fired central heating put in.”
However the house was not in a very good state as it had been empty for a while. “For the first two years we didn’t have a penny to spare even though Margaret continued to teach and I worked at my printing business,” says Ben. “Our money went on general repairs, such as retiling the leaking roof and replacing the top floor ceiling which was water-damaged. We also discovered that the mushrooms growing on the downstairs cloakroom ceiling were due to a leaking pipe immediately above. The kitchen was a 1970s formica job, the laurel hedge had grown 30 feet high and while we loved the space we did not quite know what to do with it.”

He adds, “It was really grim. Soon after we arrived I went out into the courtyard with a spade to get rid of the stinging nettles and within two minutes had hit a mains water pipe! It took me half a day repairing it. That pretty much typified our first year there. Every time we started something we had to stop to sort something else out.”

Another instance was the loo upstairs, the bowl of which was cracked; as a result the floorboards had been slowly rotting for years but previous owners had covered them with plywood.”

However after some thought they decided to renovate the second (top) floor which was derelict and turn it into a flat to let. This meant replastering it (and much of the rest of the house), creating two bathrooms up there from storage rooms and chipping away at the glued-on posters on the walls. The rent from the tenants who moved in was quite a help.

“The village people were a help too, bringing us items of furniture they did not need,” says Ben. “After all, the furniture we brought with us filled only one room! But with so many repairs needed we really did begin to think we had taken on too much and thought we might have to sell. So our tenants moved out.”

Then one day Margaret had a brainwave which changed their lives round completely. “We had so much space we realised we could let most of it out for conferences, weekend events such as family celebrations and hen-parties and so on,” says Ben. “We created a website and in no time at all we were inundated with people wanting to stay.”

This meant the couple had to move extremely fast to make the house suitable which included turning three bedrooms into more bathrooms on the first floor, putting in a new kitchen and furnishing the place properly. “Luckily Margaret’s parents down-sized and gave us a lot of their stuff originally bought in South Africa. We also went to auctions,” says Ben.

The couple did as much work on their home as possible which included four days of Ben’s chiselling away old grey lino which had been glued to the concrete floor of the kitchen and then removing the concrete too. “A lot of blood, sweat and tears were spent over this floor.” says Margaret. “Everyone tried to persuade me to lay new slabs down, as about two inches of nasty concrete lay above the original tiles but after three weeks using a Kanga hammer, chisels, sanders, grinders and a lot of elbow grease we managed to get through the concrete and rescue them. Only around 20 of them were completely smashed so were searched the internet until we found a company that sold the old imperial-sized tiles and replaced them. What a job!”

Ben also knocked out an old fireplace to install a range cooker. “It was completely blocked up with bricks and soot and at least 20 dead crows,” says Margaret. He also removed a 1940s monstrosity of a fireplace in the snug to put in one of marble found in Margaret’s mother’s cellar. “It fitted perfectly,” he says.

Local tradesmen came in for the more difficult (if relatively small) jobs such as building a more appropriate porch – “the previous 1960s one was like a lean-to leaking greenhouse” – replacing missing oak banisters (James Walker did both jobs) as well as the major plumbing, electrical and building work.

“When the roof was being repaired we hardly noticed the difference it caused as we were so cold anyway,” says Ben. “Although we did get a bit desperate when the water tank burst and water flowed down through all three floors. I must have lost one and a half stone in those first six months as we spent our spare daylight time in the garden and at nights working on the house.”

But after seven years hard labour things are very different for the Owens now. The big old house is in perfect order and exudes an old-fashioned welcome and the gardens are restored.

“The reason we love our home so much is because we appreciate every little thing in it and how long it took to get there,” says Margaret. “Take the wooden skirting boards and the door frames – they took days of hard graft and labour with a heat torch to remove the years of paint! The floor boards are my favourite as they replaced the old damp smelly carpets from the 70s and took a lot of care!

“There were no gardens at Barrington when we moved in, just a sort of jungle, but it was so much fun discovering the old hidden stone paths and uncovering hellebores and peonies in the overgrown bushes. The grass was four foot high and full of brambles and nettles but – except for our beautiful sweet chestnut tree which has been there for 200 years – we have planted all that you can see.”

To stay at Barrington House tel: 0800 458 1018.