How To Renovate

Ep31 Halloween Special: Renovation Horror Stories

• Tash South • Season 1 • Episode 31

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Hello and Happy Halloween!

This week, as it’s my 31st episode and we are in Halloween week, I’m taking you back to some of my own Renovation Horror Stories! 

Join me inside as I recount some of the scariest, hairiest times during my 16 years of renovating. From collapsing foundations to nosy neighbours and surprise pregnancies, it’s all in there - and as always, I treat you to some tips on how to deal with all the tricky situations.

I’ll see you inside to share my reno horrors and to help you avoid your own! 

Other Episodes mentioned:
Episode 1 common renovation regrets and concerns
Episode 4, 5 important things to do before you start your renovation
Episode 19, 7 things you can do to prep for your build
Episode 21, 6 things you can do to reduce stress during the construction phase
Episode 27, How to avoid delays onsite
Episode 6, 5 questions to ask to find the right builder



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Hi I'm your host, Tash South I'm an Interior Designer and Renovation Consultant.
Each episode of How To Renovate is short, but brimming with practical advice to help you manage your renovation project with confidence and success.

Grab some more renovation advice & free resources and become part of the South Place Studio Renovation Community at
https://www.southplacestudio.com/freebies

Everything I teach about renovation falls within my Five Pillar Process for A Successful Renovation, to learn more about the process, head to
https://www.southplacestudio.com/pillars


Or if you want to get social, you can find us here:

Instagram: @southplacestudio

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Speaker 1:

Hello, hello everybody, and welcome back to the how to Renovate podcast. So this week I thought I'd do something a little bit different because it is Halloween week and, as this episode is episode number 31 and it's been released during Halloween week, I thought I would take you through some renovation horror stories. Now I certainly have my fair share of renovation horror stories. Now, I certainly have my fair share of renovation horror stories. I've done so many over the years and also I've been working with clients and things are always discovered that you weren't expecting, and I'm sure you may have some of your own to share as well. Please drop me an email if you have any to share. If you have anything that's gone wrong or anything strange that's happened on a renovation, I'd love to hear about it. So drop me an email or drop me a message on the socials. Everything's in the show notes. I'd love to hear your renovation horror stories and how you dealt with them, but for this episode I wanted to share some stories but then also show how you can avoid these things happening. I've certainly learned from many, many horror stories over the year how to deal with them, how to approach them and generally you never can tell what will happen when you start a renovation, and you may encounter some difficult things. But this is exactly why I started this podcast really is to pass on all this information I have and all these lessons I've learned from finding out these horror stories, learning how to deal with them, overcoming them and coming through on the other side. So it's exactly why I started this podcast and why I put everything out there that I do on my website, on my blog, on my socials. It's because I would love to teach you how to deal with these things yourself, or maybe even avoid them if you can, and so it just makes your innovation a little bit smoother, makes it run more on time, perhaps saves you some money. So this is exactly why I started this podcast. So I thought it was a really good opportunity to share some of these stories with you. So I'm going to start with a couple of strange things that I found when working for some clients.

Speaker 1:

So quite a few times now, we found when the builder starts demolishing whatever they need to demolish in order to build whatever might be the new building. Quite often here in London and I think in the UK as well we find that these old houses, the old Victorian houses or Edwardian houses are really built on really really shallow foundations and they are not even that sturdy Quite a few projects I've worked on. Now, once we get down to foundation level we find that the houses are built on about 50 centimetres of what is almost like a kind of a brittle rubble stones kind of compacted together and it does make you wonder how these houses have been standing for over 100 years. But you know, here they are and they are still standing and they're still some of the most sought after architectural styles in London. But of course, when we come to find those shallow foundations, whatever is constructed new needs to be built on proper foundations. So we'll dig deep to the required level, we'll fill with concrete and then we'll build on top of those. But I find that is quite shocking to people, to clients, when they find out that their whole house is resting on these shallow foundations. So that usually scares quite a few people where they think, oh my gosh, I can't believe my house has been standing on these shallow foundations. But obviously when we construct new, whatever is put into the ground then supports the new part and sometimes even that supports the existing building as well. So that usually sorts out that problem. But I have to say it's quite shocking when people find out what their houses are actually built on.

Speaker 1:

Usually these horror stories are coming when we're in the demolition phase, because that's usually where we find what other builders had done before. Perhaps they hadn't done everything properly. You'll find strange things like fireplaces filled with rubble, filled with rubbish, so you have to kind of open them up, get everything out and do it properly again. One time we even found a plastic crow, so I mean a plastic bird, a crow that had been. The previous builders must have thought it would be really funny to bury this plastic crow into the wall kind of quite scary looking thing that would then be uncovered years later, if ever their house was renovated again. And I'll never forget the day I was on site with the builder, with a client, with a structural engineer and the architect when this piece of wall came away and this kind of sharp beak of a plastic crow was sticking out of the wall and it was quite large and we all kind of took a step back and tried to figure out if it had actually been a real bird at one stage that had been trapped in the wall. But then, on closer inspection, we found that it was some kind of strange practical joke that these builders must have put in the wall before as a practical joke for someone else to find in future. These are kind of the odd things you find when you start demolition of the existing building before you start to add your new parts to it. So just beware when you're renovating. When you get to demo stage you might find some strange things.

Speaker 1:

But moving on now to some of my own horror stories, I would like to share with you a few stories of my own renovations I've done before and I'm sure, as I've said many times before, I've done quite a few. My husband and I have been renovating our own properties now for at least 12 years or so and we run through a few of the horror stories we have encountered during our own renovations. And then also I want to give you some lessons I've learned on how perhaps you can avoid or deal with the same situations. Way back in 2008, we were doing our very first renovation well, our first major renovation anyway when we were adding a rear extension onto our ground floor flat. At that point, this was our first major renovation. We didn't have a huge budget. We were trying to do everything as cost effectively as we could, as I guess we all try and do with our very first renovations, and we'd found these builders and their quote had come in very, very cheap, much cheaper than the other three quotes we'd gotten. I mean because we were quite young back then and we needed to save money, we needed to do it on a budget.

Speaker 1:

We decided to go with these builders and I have to say the builders started off absolutely amazing. They came in, they did the demo. They were like machines. They kind of really got into the project and I think perhaps that was part of the problems. They demoed an existing outbuilding which was touching the rear of the house, which needed to go. They also then started digging the foundations by hand and kind of wheeling all the soil, all the earth away.

Speaker 1:

We then found out that we needed to go even deeper on the foundations than standard because there was a big tree next door which could eventually affect the foundations. So the roots of the trees sometimes can affect your new foundations. They can cause them to crack, they can cause damage to them. So in that case, if you have a tree close to your boundary or close to your foundations. You need to go even deeper, below the tree roots so that you can have that extra stability. So when we had a building control visit, this is what they decided we had to do. And our new enthusiastic builders? They said, fine, and they kept digging by hand. They just kept going, kept going. Those foundations had to be, if I recall correctly, nearly 3.5 metres deep, so really deep. And these guys just kept going and we just thought, oh, they're amazing, they just kept digging, kept going, no machines, no, nothing, just by hand doing everything.

Speaker 1:

And then one weekend the guys were not working. That day it was a Saturday or a Sunday and they were having the weekend off. We had some really heavy rain and we had these trenches in our back garden and here in London in certain areas there's the clay soil and little did we know all the heavy rain had softened the clay soil and when we looked out of the back doors into the garden we could see slowly the foundations into the garden. We could see slowly the foundations just starting to cave in on themselves and filling the gaps until over the weekend they almost completely collapsed and filled themselves back in again and at novices, at this point. We didn't really know what to do. So we called the builder and he came in straight away and we had a discussion over what we should do. We were obviously really glad it happened on a weekend, not while the guy was in there digging these foundations.

Speaker 1:

But it turns out what they were supposed to do was, as they were digging, they were supposed to board up the size of the trenches to prevent the soil sliding back in in bad weather, like like with the rain. But we didn't know that, as this was our very first extension we'd ever had built, and I think they either thought that the foundations would hold as they were they didn't think to support them and board them up or it was also because they were quite new to it, so they had not done that so many projects before. So we had this combination of us being first-time builders and also that them not being very experienced builders, which then resulted in these foundations falling in and we just didn't quite know what to do. But we sat down with them. They did admit that it was their fault and they didn't know that that's what they were meant to do. They did re-dig all the foundations on their time and on their cost. And then they did obviously board them up as they were going along and fix the issue, but that did really lose us nearly two weeks on the project timeline because obviously not only were they now digging, they had to support, they had to rebuild up the part that had fallen in. So that really damaged our timeline in the end. But luckily they were good guys and they sorted the problem at their expense and on their time.

Speaker 1:

So I say the lesson we learned here is is that really you have to vet your builders, you have to carefully go through their work, you have to have to go and see previous projects, speak to their previous clients and have a conversation with them and see how they worked. Did they know what they were doing? What was the quality of their work? What was their communication like? Did they put things right when they went wrong? So these are questions you can ask all of their previous clients. So do ask for contact of their previous clients so that you can speak to them, do us to see those previous projects and if you want some more on this point, you can go to episode 6 and it's five things to ask to find the right builder. So go and give that episode a listen. It's got loads of info in there to help you find the right builder and the right questions to ask so that you hire someone who knows what they're doing.

Speaker 1:

Okay, we're moving on to the next scary story. Everybody, now this one. This is another rear extension we're adding onto a flat at one of our next properties. After the story I just told and I remember this date very, very well because it also involves, like many renovations it involves the birth of our first daughter. So this renovation had a couple of things going on.

Speaker 1:

The first nightmare was the neighbours. We had some really, really nosy neighbours at this property and what they would do is they had totally convinced themselves. So, even though we had followed everything to the letter in terms of following the planning process, getting everything laid out properly, speaking to the neighbors before we started the renovation, telling them exactly what we're going to do, for some reason the neighbor had still convinced herself that we were doing things wrong, and she used to come in the middle of the night or early in the morning with her tape measure. She used to measure everything out. So she used to sneak onto our property because obviously we had to take out a part of the fence so that the builders could access the rear of the house. So there were bits of the fence missing. So she could actually come into our side of the fence, into our property, and she'd sneak in with a tape measure. She'd measure everything we were doing. She would even tell us that we were using the wrong brick colour, even though we'd selected a original brick. So here in London there's there are bricks called London stock and you have to sometimes match exactly the colour of the existing building, particularly in your, if you're in a conservation area like this property was.

Speaker 1:

She used to come over and try to tell us that we needed to hand select every single brick before we started building. But I have to say the worst thing was the measuring. So she'd even sneak in in the morning before the builders arrived on site and start measuring just to make sure that we weren't building an extension larger than we were allowed to, which obviously we would never do For some reason. She just had convinced herself we were doing it all wrong and she was caught by the builder one morning, really early, measuring out and he had a word with her and said you can't do this. They're doing everything right, they're doing everything by the book. And she kind of snuck back back to her house a little bit embarrassed and I don't think she she'd come back to measure again after being caught out. But the reason we know that she did that was because the builder had caught her doing that and she used to message us every single day just giving her information, giving her advice on how exactly we should be building our extension.

Speaker 1:

So that was something we had to deal with on that project, which I have to say was quite difficult and not very pleasant. It was quite stressful because, like I say, I was pregnant at the time and it was quite difficult to deal with, especially when you're trying to approach somebody in a nice manner but they are completely convinced, for one reason or another, that you're doing things wrong. So if you want to go and listen more on how to deal with tricky neighbours, go and check out episode 22. It's called how to deal with neighbours and in that episode I cover lots of points on the many things I've learned since then, on things you can do to better manage and not get so stressed out when you are having to deal with tricky neighbours such as this one. So do go and check that one out. But another thing that happened on this build was, like I said, I was pregnant and the start of the project had been delayed, mainly because we couldn't find a contractor that we were quite happy to go with. But, as I said, I remember the date well.

Speaker 1:

We'd started in the October of 2012 and my daughter was due in November of 2012, and this one particular day I was actually booked in to go to the hospital for a c-section to have my daughter, and I was on site with the builders. I was preparing them, I was briefing them in on everything they needed to do while I was in the hospital having my daughter. Um, that very day, and, as luck would have it, as I was briefing in the builders, my waters broke and I had to make some excuses uh, kind of leave, leave the area that they were in. And then, on this day, it was the exact day that they were breaking through the back of the house. So opening up our flat to the elements on this exact day in preparation to add the roof and then, obviously, progress on to making the extension watertight, but that would only happen in a few weeks to come. So on this day. I made my excuses. I left the room.

Speaker 1:

I found my husband, who was obviously home that day as well because he was going to come to the hospital and we were going to have a baby that day, and I just decided that I would first brief in the builders and have a meeting, which was a bad decision. But I found him. I told him what had happened. We then had to be rushed to the hospital because it was no longer a book. It could no longer be considered a booked in C-section. It then had to be considered an emergency C-section. So we left the house as soon as possible, went to the hospital and we just had to leave the builders to it. I was then in a situation where we had the baby and I was in the hospital. Unfortunately, I wasn't very well, but we were then in a situation where I was trying to manage the build remotely after not being well and then having a baby.

Speaker 1:

I have to say that was one of the most difficult things I've done before and I know that sometimes renovations they do come when babies come, because, of course, when people find out that they're pregnant or they want to have a family, that's also the time that they decide that they need some more space, or they do need some more space, and that's when they need to renovate. So it's not a coincidence that these things come at the same time. I don't have an episode of this podcast to refer you to in terms of what happens when you go into labour on the same day as the back of your house is being demolished. Perhaps I should record one, but I think, in terms of having the renovation planned well and knowing what we wanted and exactly where everything was going to go, meant that I could, when I was well enough, again communicate to the builders even remotely what we wanted and what they needed to do so as to keep the project moving forward and so that we could actually move into that property by Christmas. I think it was so we were. We were back home in our house by Christmas, even though the property had no back to the house on the 7th of November 2012, which I will never forget.

Speaker 1:

Okay, so we're on to the last scary story now. There's actually there's two stories in this one, so these stories are on our complete house build that we did, so we built it completely from scratch, so there was nothing there before. Nothing was demolished. It was a complete new build from nothing. So this was quite a huge project and this is really where I learned so much about building and renovating was building something completely from scratch. So on this one, as you can imagine, there were quite a few things came up that we had to deal with.

Speaker 1:

So I'm going to tell you two stories that happened on this project. They're two that obviously stuck out for us because they really are days that I will never forget when these two things happened. One of them involves a neighbor again, and the other story involves a baby again. So the first story is I remember one night we were. So the first story is I remember one night we were well into the build. The foundations had gone in and also it had a basement level. So there had been a huge amount of in the ground digging, construction, concrete work, and so we were beyond all that and the walls of the house had started to go up the outer walls of the house, so the shape was forming, but, bear in mind, all this concrete work had been taking place below those walls. So we'd been on site for a good few months at this stage. We were obviously not living there at the moment, because it wasn't even a house, so we were renting elsewhere.

Speaker 1:

And I remember getting ready to go to bed. It was late, it was going to be quite late that night. It was about 11 o'clock and I thought, just before I went to bed, I thought I'll just quickly check my emails, because when you're in a build like this, there are so many factors, so many things to be on top of and to have your eye on, and I remember just quickly going to check my emails before I went to bed for a good night's rest. That's what I was hoping for anyway. And I looked at my emails and the first thing I saw was an email from the neighbour next door to where the house was being built and the subject line said something like house in the wrong place and I just thought, oh my god, what is this about? And I said to my husband I was like check your emails. I was like what is this? And I opened the email and our neighbour, who was also a structural engineer, had taken it upon himself to tell us by email at 11 o'clock at night that he thought that the house had been built in the a little bit too far forward than where he thought it should be built.

Speaker 1:

And of course, my husband and I went into complete panic mode At about quarter past 11,. We start calling our architect trying to find out is this true? Is the house really in the wrong place? What had happened? If it is in the wrong place, how on earth could that even have happened? And the architect, of course, did not answer because it was 11 o'clock at night and he was probably asleep. And so I remember that night going to bed really really stressed out, thinking oh my goodness, what if the house is in the wrong place? If the house is in the wrong place, the concrete basement is in the wrong place because the walls were built directly on top of the concrete basement level. So how on earth could we even fix that? And I don't even think either of us slept that night. We were so worried. We were so concerned that a mistake had been made, that the architect perhaps measured out where the front of the house had been incorrectly, or perhaps the builders had misunderstood the plans and built it in the wrong place. And so that was just one of the most awful nights I remember in all of my history of renovating or building, obviously first thing in the morning, as soon as we could, we were on the phone to the architect and he was very relaxed and reassured us that everything should be as it should be. And he was great. He came on site straight away, re-measured everything, showed our neighbour that it was in the right place. It was in the right place according to the drawings. It was in the right place according to the drawings. It was right. It was in the right place according to what planning permission had been granted for.

Speaker 1:

And I can honestly say that day was one of the most relieved I've ever felt is just to know that everything was correct and that the neighbor had panicked for some reason and not checked things properly. But you know these things happen and neighbors can, without even knowing, do this to you and put you through these levels of stress and you really have to kind of hold your own. Try not to panic. Make sure that you're checking with the right people on the details and not just believe it when someone says your house is in the wrong place or you're doing the wrong thing. You know. Be confident that your professionals know what they're doing. Go to them first, check with them first before reacting or before before going back to your neighbours. And if everything has been done correctly, then of course it's a huge relief, and if they haven't, then it's something that will have to be dealt with properly. But I would say, try not to panic. I know it's really difficult, I know definitely we panicked in that situation, but now I think when things do go a little bit wrong or people say this is how it should be or that's wrong, I always take a breath first. I check with the professionals, first make sure I've got all the information, everything that's needed, before going back to the person with a concern and then just laying everything out clearly. And again, episode 22 how to deal with neighbors will help you with this kind of situation. So do go and listen to that one if you haven't already. And then also, another episode that might be useful for you on this point in terms of other people's opinions, is episode number 30. So that's just the last one I recorded. That was released last week and it's called should you ask for other people's opinions on your renovation, so do give that one a listen as well. There's some good tips in there, okay? So moving on to my last horror story for this episode. So this story also involves a baby.

Speaker 1:

So what happened on our house build was my husband, rich, and I decided that we would get a full construction team to build the shell of the house and then we would then take on the completion of the build. So we would be completely in control of hiring our own trades, ordering our own materials, basically managing from the shell of the build all the way through to completion ourselves. So we would be the project management on that. And the reason we did that was because of budget. So to hire a contractor, to hire a team to work with us from complete start to complete finish, we just didn't have the funds to do that. So this was a way we could afford to complete the house and also get what we wanted. But obviously we would have to put more hours in and from this point on I'd already decided to leave my work as a graphic designer and I was retraining and I started my business into the renovations world. So we decided this would be a great way to do it.

Speaker 1:

Again, I remember this date very, very well and you'll find out why in a minute but on the exact day that the contractors finished their contract for the shell of the building. So on the day, the 1st of December 2017, the contractors finished their part on the shell of the building and they completely handed over the project to us, so they would not be coming on site any longer. They were completely finished with their part, as we'd agreed, and on this day, the 1st of December 2017, I discovered that I was pregnant again. It was an unexpected pregnancy. It's's a long story. I won't go into all the details, but we'd experienced some loss in between our first daughter and our second daughter and we weren't sure it could even happen. But on this day, I'd been feeling unwell and I took a test. On this day, I'd been feeling unwell and I took a test and I was pregnant, which, of course, was great. But it was completely and utterly unexpected.

Speaker 1:

And then, all of a sudden, I had a whole build to do. I had a whole build to manage pretty much on my own, obviously with the help of my husband, but he also has a full-time job. So it was a really, really scary day. It was exciting in many ways because obviously, we wanted both things to happen. We had a point in our lives where these two huge, exciting things were about to happen, but just at the same time, which we really weren't expecting. So it then meant that I went through the next few months nearly the whole pregnancy, of managing a build whilst being quite unwell in my pregnancy.

Speaker 1:

So I remember days where it was January, I was still getting morning sickness. I was up the ladder in the snow to the top of the building, chatting with the builders, talking about layout, talking about plans, talking about structure, steel beams, meeting with the architects on the top of an unfinished building with morning sickness. I will never forget these days, and because there were complications before and I hadn't really told many people that I was pregnant yet I was on site feeling obviously really ill, really unwell, with all these these men that I could not tell that I was pregnant, and just having to get on with it, deal with it and continue to manage the project. It was tricky to do. I have to admit that I got really bad morning sickness and I had to just kind of get on with things because neither thing could wait, neither thing could stop, and so I just had to carry on. But you know, I did it.

Speaker 1:

We managed to get the bill done before the baby came, but it was nearly the whole pregnancy. So from the stage of the shower being finished to the day that we moved in, it had been almost exactly eight months. I had one more month left before the baby came. Once we'd moved in to the house which still it wasn't quite finished, it still needed quite a few things, but at least we could move in, we could get settled in and we could be ready for the baby. But it was really not the build I was expecting and it also was not the pregnancy I was expecting. So I mean, those two things are amazing to have now. Obviously it's a little miracle we could have our second daughter and also we have this amazing house that we've built that is completely our own. So it was all worth it, but it was really really tough at points, as you can imagine.

Speaker 1:

Again, I don't have an episode to refer you to for what happens when you are pregnant and you're in the middle of a house build or you have no back to your house. But what I can say is that many of the episodes of how to Renovate are all about planning. So I think because the build was so well planned at the point that I found out I was pregnant, I'd been planning for years. Almost I've been planning for, I think, about the whole time it took for us to get planning permission and doing the legals, which at that point was about three years. So I had three years of thinking about how I wanted the house to be laid out, how I wanted it to look, which materials I wanted, which flooring we wanted. So everything had been pre-planned, which made everything run a lot smoother. Obviously, we needed to find the trades and we still needed to find the right people to do things, but in terms of having everything well planned and not having to make major decisions on what we wanted, really just took the pressure off. And then having everything so well planned just meant that the unexpected news of being pregnant it didn't throw me off the project because I already knew everything that needed to be done, where I wanted everything, everything that I wanted to have in the house in terms of materials, fixtures, fittings, and so the level of decision wasn't that much because everything had been planned so well before.

Speaker 1:

And I think that if you plan your renovation well, then unexpected whatever it might be, won't throw you off course. You can still keep to your timeline and keep to your budget because you have your planning, you have your style, you have your layout, you have your mood boards, everything that I keep talking about in the in the podcast. If you have everything planned, so well then you know, anything unexpected is not going to completely throw you off course and get you all stressed out because you're like, okay, I can deal with this news, I can still carry on with the renovation, because I'm not now in the process of the renovation, having to dedicate so much time to decision making, to layout, to all of those things, because you've pre-done it. You've done your pre-planning, which is really what I keep banging on about in this podcast is that's where. That's where the gold is. It's all in the pre-planning. That's where your time saving comes in, that's where your money saving comes in. That's exactly what takes the stress out of the renovation in terms of all that decision making. So if you thought through your layout, your style, your design, you know the process.

Speaker 1:

So obviously I've got loads of episodes to recommend for you here. Episode one common renovation, regrets and concerns it's called, so that's a good one to start off with. I've also got episode four for you. So that's five important things to do before you start your renovation, so that will get you on track before you start. Episode 19 is a good one. That's seven things you can do to prep for your bills so that before you go on site, before work start on site, listen to that episode, try and follow, try and do all those things. That's going to save you a lot of stress. Episode 21 six things you can do to reduce stress during the construction phase, so that's when you're on site. These are things you can do while you're on site and that will just take the pressure off. Those things will take the pressure off while you're on site. And then episode 27 how to avoid delays on site. Again, you can listen to these episodes.

Speaker 1:

Wait before you start, prepare yourself, because any unexpected news that comes your way you'll be able to deal with it easy. And then, of course, the last point here is your team. So if you've hired the right people and you get unexpected news, they will support you. They should support you. And if they have all the information, if you've planned well and you can hand over your brief and all of your plans and your mood boards and your style boards and your schedule of works and everything that you put all that effort into creating before you started. If your team is good and your contract is good, they can carry on from everything that you've prepared and you can just you can kind of check in with them and just make sure everything makes sense. Everyone's on the same track. So that's really important, for if anything unexpected comes up and for that, go listen to episode six and it's five questions you can ask to find the right builder. And again, same as the first story, I'm going to recommend episode six, five questions to ask the right builder. Because if you've got your team right, if you've got your contractor right, they will support you and they will help you deal with any unexpected news or any unexpected events that may happen in your life. If you've got the right team behind you, then your build will stay on track and hopefully on budget as well. Well, that brings us to the end of the episode.

Speaker 1:

Everybody, I hope you've enjoyed this one. Just thought I'd do something a little bit different this week. And again, if you have any horror stories or any haunted house stories, I'd really love to hear them. Perhaps you could even come on the podcast next Halloween. I'd love to have someone on with some great horror stories for Halloween. Well, enjoy your Halloween week. I hope you have lots of fun.

Speaker 1:

I'm from South Africa and we don't really celebrate Halloween there, so when I moved to London, and especially after we had kids, they absolutely love it. It's such a fun time of year and obviously it's my daughter's birthday, coming up again 7th of November. Um, as you just heard, renovation number two when we had no back of the house when she was born. So we really love it, we really enjoy it and it's such a fun time for everybody. I hope you enjoy it too, and I look forward to seeing you next week for the next episode of how to renovate. I'll see you then. Bye for now.

Speaker 1:

For more information on my five pillar process for successful renovation, you can go directly to southplacestudiocom forward slash pillars, where you'll find an introduction to the process, which covers each of the pillars and what they cover. We also have a number of other free renovation resources. Go now to southplacestudiocom forward slash freebies. I have created some amazing freebies for you there. There is one on the process, like we just said. There is one on planning permission. There is one on kitchen design. There is another one on lighting planning. Go and check those out. There's so much free information there to help you with your renovation.