The first on-site activity of any property development is the ‘rip-out’ stage, when you need a mixture of muscle, structural knowledge and guts, writes Anna Halloran, director of Oxford-based interior designers Spiering & Co, who has six weeks and £30,0000 to transform a wreck in Marston into a beautiful home.
Most of the problems of the project come out during this stage, so you have to be prepared to make some difficult calls, change your plans and take a few deep breaths.
When you buy a house, if you’re cautious like me, you will have had a structural survey done. This enables you to second-guess and plan around any disasters which may raise their ugly heads.
The worst problems are often the best hidden, something I’ve been reminded of this week.
I’ve never encountered quite so many problems in the first week, let alone first three hours.
I had to completely rethink my electrical, lighting, kitchen, living room and bathroom plans within the space of a few hours.
Luckily, I’m on-site daily to tackle each issue and have accepted my social life is over for the next six weeks.
Our first issue was probably the scariest but the easiest to resolve. When we removed the window seat and ledge from the bay window in the front reception room, the plaster crumbled in our hands, dislodging the existing brickwork which holds the
house up.
To make matters worse, somewhere along the line someone had replaced the original bricks with wooden blocks.
This is when having a good builder on site is imperative, as what looks like a disaster to
you may have a simple and
cost-effective solution.
After replacing the wooden blocks with bricks, we will re-plaster, using fibre glass mesh for added support.
The next problem was a hidden chimney stemming from the kitchen, up through the back of the water tank in the first-floor bathroom and finishing on the roof. I wrongly assumed it would be easily removed and wouldn’t have predicted needing party-wall agreements or steel to support the structure.

Once we had removed the old water tank in the shower, it became clear that if I wanted the chimney gone in the kitchen, it would need to be removed top to bottom.
I looked into the time and costs involved with a local structural engineer and decided it was not worth it. Instead, I redesigned the kitchen and bathroom to work around the existing structure with the use of extra panel and plaster boards, losing just 200mm from both designs.
As our roof had received a number-one rating by a surveyor, we felt confident we wouldn’t encounter any problems.
However, as we were ripping out the bathroom, the timber joist started to crumble away.
There was a tiny gap in the joinery between the new extension and the original house, which enabled water to seep through into the roof’s beams.
Once we started ripping out the tiles and shower rails, the problem became obvious.
Issues like this often look worse than they are and after a meeting with a local roofer, we found a solution which was to remove the beam and re-cement the joinery between the two extensions.
The big win for me this week was the removal of a wall in the living room.
I was unsure whether it would be possible without the use of steel but after a visit from a brilliant local structural engineer, Tarik Beshai, we discovered we could remove it, as long as we left a 300mm buttress.
On-the-spot decisions have to be made constantly when developing properties, which can be stressful and time-consuming but when you see fantastic results like this, it’s worth it.