Our story is a modern family fairy tale: an amicable divorce, exes selling one family home and needing to magically split the proceeds and afford two family homes.
House-hunting in Walthamstow, east London – trying not to move too far, so my children didn’t have to change schools – I eventually stumbled on the Ugly Duckling house. A bit of a doer-upper, it had sat on the market for months. Only I could see magical potential.
It was a good-sized, thirties, end-of-terrace house. It had a crazy two-storey wooden summer house at the bottom of the garden. It had a strange (broken) sauna in the loft. And everything in between needed work. Some rooms just needed decorating but the kitchen and patio were both falling to bits.
It was also surrounded by nature: a forest and a park on its doorstep, the urban wildlife corridor of a railway line behind it. I first viewed the house late at night, having heard of it via a friend, and in the garden in the dark we bumped into a hedgehog. I was quietly smitten and no other house viewings after it could compare.
I’m a journalist and I work from home, testing gadgets, so I needed plenty of space for not just me and my two children but also my work stuff, including lots of boxes of kit. I knew that taking on the Ugly Duckling house would be a big project, but I’d done up houses (to a lesser extent) before so I wasn’t too intimidated. I knew that the best house I could afford would be to buy this one and budget to do it up.
