WE SPENT EVERY PENNY ON 100-ROOM HISTORIC HOUSE
PAID: £650,000 SPENT: £1m NOW WORTH: Around £2m PROFIT: £350,000
Helen PHilliPs, 49, is a scientist and writer. in 2014 she and her engineer husband, Harvey, 52, bought 100-room grade ii-listed Moreton House in Devon (moretonhousedevon.com), where they live with their children aged 12 and eight. Helen says:
In the six years since we bought Moreton house — for not much more than some of the new builds down here — we’ve spent almost every penny we’ve ever earned renovating nearly 50 of the 100 rooms. We had planned to retire to Canada, but we liquidated all our investments and sold our home to pay for Moreton.
It’s been the most exhausting, exhilarating thing we’ve ever done. And we’re only halfway through!
When we viewed the house in August 2014, we were buzzing, amazed that such a vast place was for sale with a guide price of just £500,000. We were looking for a project big enough to give us both something to work on, we love Georgian architecture and it was a property that needed saving.
Built in 1820, it had been a boarding school for 50 years and empty since 2009. there was no time to get a structural survey done — we viewed it on a Friday and the closing day for sealed bids was the following Monday. When we got the call a week later to say it was ours, I had to sit down!
While we finished our stint abroad with harvey’s job in the oil industry, we sold the home we’d kept in exeter and moved into Moreton during the summer of 2016.
Any romantic notions we had quickly disappeared that first winter when it was minus four degrees inside, with just one dodgy electric heater in one room, and buckets collecting drips.
the most urgent problems included the leaking roof and the endemic dry rot. harvey designed the heating system and project manages the renovation, keeping a tight grip on finances.
We’ve kept costs down by making this our full-time job, working alongside builders and tradespeople.
After tackling the urgent work, we renovated a flat that belonged to the school matron. We’ve since finished 15 more rooms to create three additional self- catering holiday lets.
We’ve also restored some of the large, formal function rooms and are launching as a wedding venue.
We went into this as a ten-year renovation project and said we’d work till our savings ran out, then rely on the property paying its way as a wedding venue to fund the rest.