Valuable homes are down to hard work and patience, not luck, argues

Yes, my place is worth a lot – but this isn’t ‘luck’, says Liz Hodgkinson. Years of toil, cash and patience made our baby boomer homes so valuable

It has become a tired old cliché for the younger generation to whinge about us baby boomers, sitting pretty in our million-pound-plus mansions that we have done nothing to deserve.

According to them, we just bought a cheap house decades ago and sat in it while its value rocketed. And, if a new government makes us sell our ivy-clad manor houses to pay for care in old age, that is only just and right.

We acquired these now high-value homes by sheer luck, they moan, as they struggle to afford tiny boxes on a huge mortgage.

The only problem is – it isn’t true. While the younger generation – and I include my now middle-aged sons, Tom and Will – partied endlessly in their youth, young people in my generation put ourselves through hell to ensure we were eventually decently housed.

We bought wrecks and gradually did them up, coming home after work to paint ceilings, spending weekends at DIY centres. We put up our own shelves, sanded our own floors, made our curtains and slept on mattresses until we could afford proper beds. We bought cheap Victorian furniture nobody wanted, lugged it home and painted it.

The first house I bought was in Newcastle – a six-bedroom Victorian terrace in terrible condition. That was after three years’ married life in a grotty flat to save up for it. In the 1960s, old houses were not popular; so we got it for £2,500. We renovated it ourselves and let out the top floor – two attic rooms and a kitchen – to students. We later rented out the spare bedroom, meaning that we lived, in effect, mortgage-free.

When we moved to London in 1970, there was nothing we could afford in the capital. My husband’s bank manager suggested we buy a modern threebedroom semi in New Malden, but we couldn’t bear the thought of deepest suburbia. Instead, against his advice, we struggled to buy a tiny, two-bedroom, overpriced cottage in Richmond for £7,800. My husband’s father lent us money to make up the mortgage, and it was a painful age before we managed to pay it back.

I just about went mad in that house, as I had two small children and no money. Couldn’t even afford a gin and tonic! But we were in Richmond, not New Malden, and, 15 months later, the property’s value had soared to £11,500. Our next fourbedroom house, also in Richmond, cost around £14,000. Once again, it was in dreadful condition and, to make things worse, we had to share it for a time with the previous owner, who had divorced and had nowhere to live.

Although I was now at work – as a journalist, like my husband – we still had no spare money and had to tart it up ourselves. Our next move was to a large Edwardian house in Richmond, untouched since the 1930s. It had no central heating, the garden was a tangle of weeds and there wasn’t a proper kitchen – even if the vendors were intellectual snobs who would say to each other, ‘Shall we speak in Latin or Greek today?’

Our final house in Richmond was a potentially beautiful but completely dilapidated Queen Anne house on the river. It is now worth £4 million but, when we bought it for £200,000 in the 1980s, we were the only idiots who would consider it. There were three or four squatters living there, trees were growing in the living room, a tenant was in the basement and the council refused permission for two parking spaces outside the front door, ordering us to put up railings. The lack of parking spaces meant the house was virtually valueless. My husband fought the council for three years to get the order overturned.

He finally won and, as a result, the house doubled in value overnight – and went on doubling. By now, though, we were getting divorced and, finances halved, I moved to yet another dump in Notting Hill. Six years later, I bought a wreck in Hammersmith and, after that, a tired old place in Worthing.

My latest home, a large flat in Oxford, was not exactly ramshackle, but very old-fashioned, and I spent years renovating this as well. The consequence is that I am one of those lucky buggers, according to the younger generation, sitting mortgage-free in my valuable pile, aged 73.

Yet, if we had bought that semi in New Malden, or stayed in the Newcastle house, we would be worth practically nothing. It is only by making all these moves, and taking huge gambles on fetid dumps in London, that many baby boomers have eventually become property millionaires.

This constant moving, and willingness to live in temporary squalor, was, I think, a unique feature of my generation. When I was growing up in St Neots, near Cambridge, nobody ever moved or did any DIY. My parents lived in the same house for more than forty years, hardly doing anything to it, and it was the same with my in-laws.

Yet, in my adult life, I have moved house ten times and lived in five locations in different parts of the country. Today’s hedonistic householders would not be prepared to do this. My sons bought small houses about fifteen years ago – with massive help from the Bank of Mum and Dad, which my generation did not get – and are still living in them. They would consider it a serious infringement of their human rights to waste time going round B&Q, when they could be out enjoying themselves.

As I think all oldies will agree, I, and many of my contemporaries, have jolly well earned every brick of our glorious homes.

‘We bought wrecks and gradually did them up, after work painting ceilings...’