Sandford House and Abbey Lane Restoration Home - One Year On

On the last series of Restoration Home, we followed the stories

of six historic buildings that desperately needed saving.

You know, we love it and we want to finish it,

but sometimes it just feels like too much.

Lift and push!

Six new owners spent hundreds of thousands of pounds

transforming them into their dream homes.

It looks incredible!

You've got your dream kitchen! That is dreamy.

'But there was still work to do.'

We'll still get it done. We'll spite them all.

So one year on, we're going back to see what's changed.

Well, well, it's done!

What a house!

It's lovely to see it finished now and actually furnished and lived in.

We'll meet the craftsmen whose work helped save these historic homes,

and the people whose stories provide a living link to the past.

That's amazing!

Sandford House in Newport-On-Tay in Fife is an Arts and Crafts

masterpiece that dates back to 1902.

It's a Category B historic property, the second highest listing

for buildings at risk in Scotland.

It was originally built as a family home, but it had spent nearly

half its life as a three-star hotel.

Over recent years, though, it had been abandoned and had fallen

into serious disrepair.

So who would take on such a massive restoration project?

Ralph Webster and Evelyn Hardy were both keen DIY-ers and they

leapt at the chance of restoring Sandford House.

It's a challenge, it really is. It's a serious challenge.

I just thought it was amazing. It's an amazing building.

I mean, it was a mess,

and it was needing an awful lot of work done to it, but you could

see right away how you could turn it into something absolutely fantastic.

The house cost them £550,000 to buy, and they've budgeted another

£530,000 to restore it.

Evelyn runs her own graphic design company, and would project

manage the restoration.

Ralph works abroad for weeks at a time, but he's known

the building all his life.

I felt sorry for it,

because it was our local pub and we used to come up, 10, 12 of us

and just completely fill the place and it was fantastic, and it just

sort of went downhill, you know, and just it's such a shame that,

you know, it hadn't been maintained to a high standard over the years.

Ralph and Evelyn planned to spend a year-and-a-half restoring the

main house to its original Arts and Crafts glory.

In a courtyard behind are two wings that once housed the hotel's

kitchen and bedrooms.

Phase two of their plans would see these converted into holiday homes

for rental but, in the meantime, they'd planned to camp out there.

They were doing much of the basic work themselves, only calling

on skilled craftsmen and friends when they were needed.

They're all local lads, and they all know each other,

and they know me and they know that we want a good job done,

so, you know, we all sort of club together and get on with it.

As far as physical work's concerned, normally I'd try

and keep the cost down, and if a wall's got to come down

I'll just get a chisel out and knock it down.

So we just get at it.

As the restoration got under way, so did our historical investigation.

Historian Dr Kate Williams would scour the archives to try and

find out who originally owned Sandford House, and where the

money came from to build this Arts and Crafts gem.

Architectural expert Kieran Long started his investigation

with a visit to see what the house itself could tell him.

This is a building from a moment in British architecture which

was just so important. The Arts and Crafts style was something

that celebrated the work of the craftsman.

So many of the houses of this period fell out of fashion quite

quickly in the early 20th century.

Some of them have been lost, some of them have not been restored,

and this is an amazing survival to me,

one that looks ripe for bringing back to its former glory.

We have this incredibly characteristic inglenook fireplace

here, which is absolutely something redolent of the Arts and Crafts.

This beautiful brickwork with thin mortar joints, you know,

carefully but unfussily made.

But 48 years as a three-star hotel

had proved a tragedy for this building.

Many of the original Arts and Crafts features had been lost or

ruined by modern building works.

There's nothing that messes up a beautifully composed facade

more than a pipe full of human waste, you know, coming

out of a bathroom somewhere, and we have another example just up here,

too, of an extractor fan, in where a tiny little window that probably

lights something picturesque behind it, and they thought, no,

we'll get rid of that and put an extractor fan in at some point.

I mean, this is kind of really, really clumsy treatment

of a really beautiful building.

Sandford House is one of only two Arts and Crafts buildings in

Scotland designed by the architect Baillie Scott.

But who was he?

Kieran wanted to find out.

It's not one of the big names of early 20th-century

and late 19th-century architecture, and so, for me,

we need to discover a lot more about this man.

When I made my first visit, Ralph and Evelyn had been working

on their restoration for over six months, but were they still

on budget and on schedule?

-Hello, I'm Caroline!

-Hello! Nice to meet you.

-Evelyn.

Evelyn, hello.

-OK, Caroline, this is the hall, here.

-Yes.

-And then through here we've got the public bar.

-The public bar?

Yes.

'What was going to be their living room used to be the hotel bar.

'Ralph had known this room since he was a teenager.'

We all came up, 12 or 14 of us came up together,

and you just grew up and did a bit of, you know, courting et cetera.

Long before you were on the scene!

-So, this would have been the place you'd bring a hot date to?

-Yeah.

Yeah, I want to impress her, I'll take her out to Sandford House!

Unless I didn't want the locals to know about her,

and then you wouldn't come here, but once everything got going,

then you could introduce her to the rest of the team, as it were.

Outside, one of the ugliest relics of the hotel, the industrial-sized

extractor unit, was due to meet its fate, with the help of

Ralph's friend, Dave.

You look really happy. What are you doing?

We're just about to destroy this ventilator.

-I'm dying to get rid of it.

-It's time to get rid of it?

Yes. I just hope it doesn't go through the kitchen window.

Yeah, yeah. Let's hope not!

But it's a bit too narrow to put scaffolding up,

so we'll just give it a go if that's all right.

Yeah, give it a yank!

Are you OK?

'They were so keen to get rid of the thing, they were a bit gung ho

'with the rapid demolition.'

-Oh!

-Perfect!

Right, ready!

All around the building were reminders of the enormity of

the project Ralph and Evelyn had taken on to return this hotel

back to a house.

They were putting every penny they had into this restoration.

The old restaurant was in the process of being transformed.

So this is going to be your lovely, lovely kitchen!

This is going to be our kitchen.

This is where you'll be cooking and eating, or just cooking?

Yes, well, this part here will be the dining room, the dining area.

Dining table.

Table and chairs here, and the other side, that'll be the kitchen.

We've got a great big island unit that goes all the way out here.

Is it important for you to get the detail right?

To get the design of the house right?

To get everything right here?

Yeah, the intention is to get it as correct as we can, you know,

basically regardless of cost.

I mean, there is a limit budget, obviously, and we're probably

way over it already, but, you know, yeah, if we're going to

repair something, we might as do it properly, and we intend to

just return it to a liveable home and with a bit of history to it.

Dr Kate Williams was researching that history.

She wanted to find out who the first owner of Sandford House was,

and her investigations took her to Dundee, just three miles away

from Sandford across the River Tay.

At the start of the 20th century,

this Scottish waterside city was booming.

Dundee in the Victorian era was incredibly wealthy.

It was a big, bustling metropolis,

and a really important industrial area.

Kate discovered that the money that built Sandford House came

from a thriving new industry - photography.

And this was the man whose money it was, Harben Valentine.

The Valentines were pioneers of commercial photography

and one of the first companies to market the picture postcard.

I've got a marvellous one here of New Zealand.

Very few Victorians could ever get to New Zealand,

but they could still look at the photos, and what's also

marvellous is I've got this picture here of Queen Victoria,

because the Valentines became the photographer to the Queen.

Harben Valentine and his family

lived at Sandford House until the 1930s.

Morag Henderson is Harben Valentine's granddaughter.

It was a good part of the country for him because he could commute

to Dundee, either by train or on the old ferry boat,

which was called the Fifie and there, he raised the family.

I remember the window latches with the black swans,

which my grandfather said was an old Valentine tradition.

I sit opposite him when I have my breakfast, where you're sitting,

and if we stare really long at him, he occasionally just smiles.

Morag was delighted her grandfather's house

might now be saved.

There just have been too many houses in Scotland that have

crumbled away since the war, been demolished or let go into ruin.

I think that the fact that Sandford is being restored is great.

One of the biggest restoration challenges at Sandford

were the windows.

Where to?

Put it over on the wall on the right-hand side of the door.

The tall bay in the sunken lounge alone had 740 panes

of leaded glass, and in all there were several thousand

around the house, and most of them needed repairing.

Specialist restorer Liz Rowley was doing the work.

This square of glass is called a quarry

and there are equal numbers of quarries running up this window,

and I'm going to just slot them into the groove in the lead.

The lead is like a letter H,

and the glass slots into the groove along the edge of the lead.

I need to make sure that all these horizontal leads are the same size,

or else my window will start to get distorted.

The lead is then soldered together, using candle tallow as a flux.

Flux allows the solder to flow over the joint,

and it's a greasy material, and it melts with the heat of the

soldering iron and creates a surface tension that pulls the solder along.

Back at Sandford House, Liz tied the finished lead panels to their

supporting bars.

Ralph and Evelyn had budgeted £10,000 for the window

restoration, but in the end, it cost two-and-a-half times that.

£25,000 was a large sum of money, but Evelyn felt they had to

do the house justice.

If you've got an Arts and Crafts house, you know, it would

just be sacrilege, I suppose,

to go and replace that with a modern double glazed unit.

You know, we never even considered doing anything like that.

It would just look terrible.

The Arts and Crafts movement was at its most popular at the turn

of the last century.

Led by designers like William Morris, it was a reaction to

Victorian industrialisation of art and design, and celebrated

the art of the craftsman, by turning the home itself into a work of art.

It was a style that Ralph and Evelyn were determined to honour,

right down to the window furniture.

The windows at Sandford were fitted with hand-crafted swan window

stays, but some had been lost, and Evelyn wanted to restore the set.

We need about ten of them.

They were obviously made for Sandford.

I've never ever seen anything like that anywhere else,

and nobody else has ever seen anything like that anywhere else.

So, you know, it would be really good to try and, you know,

replace the ones that, you know, have gone missing over the years.

It's likely the original swans were custom made at least a century ago.

Evelyn has left one of the surviving handles with local blacksmith

John Donne to see if he could replicate it.

-There's the original.

-Yes.

-And that's the one we've made.

-Oh, very good! That's brilliant!

Obviously it's done different ways than what that was done originally.

You know, that would have been heated up, hammered out...

Right, yes.

..and what we've done is individually cut that out

-and then welded it onto there and just smoothed it off...

-Right, yes.

..and then we drilled the holes,

and then just centre punched these wee dimples...

-To get that.

-..to give it that effect.

-I mean, there's no way we would get it any better than that.

-Yeah.

I think that's really, really good.

Next on Evelyn's Arts and Crafts shopping list was furniture.

Arts and Crafts furniture is quite plain and simple in style,

but everything is just so well made,

and, you know, it's wee things like the details of these.

These handles are just lovely.

Evelyn was particularly looking for a wardrobe for the main bedroom.

I love that turquoisey blue colour, that's really nice.

That would suit the space perfectly.

Down in London, at the Royal Institute of British Architects,

Kieran was closing in on the trail of architect Baillie Scott.

During his career, he designed nearly 300 buildings,

and when Harben Valentine commissioned him to build Sandford

in 1902, he would have been a very fashionable choice of architect.

The house was called Sandford Cottage then,

and had a thatched roof.

It says here, "This little house was built in Scotland

"in a district where thatching with reeds was still understood,

"and so this method of roofing was adopted."

But less than ten years after it was built, disaster struck.

We found these extraordinary pictures of a conflagration,

a blaze that has destroyed this beautiful thatched cottage.

In this picture, we just see the roof completely disappeared,

a kind of ruin shrouded in smoke.

Harben Valentine commissioned Baillie Scott to redesign the house.

This time it was built with a tiled roof and looked very much

like it does today.

But 100 years later, the new owners of Sandford House were facing

another challenge.

In one of the biggest rooms in the house, the sunken lounge,

the new plasterwork wouldn't hold.

You put the first skim on, and it was dried and it felt solid

and it looked as if it was going to be good,

and he put the finishing coat on today.

But when he put the bonding coat on, it soaked in

and the plaster just fell off.

The problem seemed to be the original wall covering, which

contained hidden layers of rubberised paint and paper.

It all had to be removed and the plasterwork redone.

The original budget to turn the main part of the building into

their home was £270,000.

One year in, and they'd spent nearly all of it.

She does worry me when she tells me we've spent over £250,000 since

we bought it, and we haven't even started on the holiday homes yet.

But they remained undaunted.

We just need to do it.

It was so unloved for so long, we'll just use every penny we've got.

We'll keep going as long as we can.

Kieran's research on architect Baillie Scott led him across

the Irish Sea to the Isle of Man.

The architect spent his early career here, and not only designed

the local police station but also his own home.

It's mock Tudor on the outside

but inside, the design is instantly recognisable.

I'm standing in the space of this amazing fireplace which,

of course, has so many parallels with Sandford.

It's exciting to be here

because this is a house that Baillie Scott designed for himself,

and that always tells you a lot about an architect.

They get to experiment and try out the things that

perhaps clients haven't let them experiment with yet.

And, most importantly for me and most interestingly,

this lovely window, this kind of concealed window that just

allows indirect light into the fireplace.

Kieran finally had some answers and a link to Sandford.

The layout of the inglenook fireplace was almost identical

to the one in Ralph and Evelyn's living room, where the

concealed window had been replaced by a hotel extractor fan.

-Hello, Evelyn, how are you?

-Fine, how are you?

-Really good, lovely to see you.

-Nice to see you.

Two years and nearly £300,000 after Evelyn and Ralph bought

Sandford House, I went to see how the restoration had turned out.

The house had come a long way from its time as a hotel.

In recent years the essence of what made this meticulously designed

family home magical had long been ripped apart and forgotten.

'What used to be the hotel bar is now their sitting room.'

Oh, it's just lovely!

What's immediately apparent now is how well it flows,

-how you are drawn into this space here.

-That's right.

And you've got the full use of this and then you can carry on...

-You can carry on down.

-..up or down.

-Yes, that's right.

-This is how people want to live now.

Yes, oh, that's it.

'In the inglenook fireplace, the extractor fan had been removed

'and Baillie Scott's signature window put in its place.

'The old restaurant was unrecognisable.'

Very, very nice.

'It's now Evelyn and Ralph's kitchen,

'flooded with light. The leaded windows perfectly frame

'the spectacular landscape beyond.'

It's a fantastically light and actually kind of effortlessly

glamorous kitchen, isn't it?

-What have we got here? Bread?

-Oh!

Oh, they're delightful, oh, they're lovely.

So really, you're bringing your own Arts and Crafts into the modern...

-Yes, I think so.

-..parts of the house.

It's these details that make the difference, isn't it?

Yes, yes, definitely.

'But there was still work to do.

'The sunken lounge and the upstairs bedrooms and bathrooms weren't

'finished, and they hadn't even started on the holiday cottages.'

It's now 12 months later, and Kieran's on his way back

to Sandford House to see if Ralph and Evelyn have finally finished their restoration.

But first, he's visiting one of the talented craftswomen whose

work was so important in that restoration.

Liz Rowley did all the leaded windows at Sandford

and is a stained glass expert.

I think the important thing about Sandford was

remembering that it was an Arts and Crafts house, and that the lead

work in the windows was a very important, integral part of the

architecture, and I'm really pleased that they made the decision to do

proper lead work and not to go down the avenue of double glazed units.

Yeah, yeah, they may have been a bit warmer,

but they would have been spiritually weaker.

That's right, that's right.

Liz has finished her work at Sandford House now, and with

her colleague, Gavin, is restoring some stained glass windows

from an Edwardian hotel.

This area round the side here is generally called

the sacrificial edge, and it's there so that

when a panel is removed, there is an edge that can be replaced

if any damage happens when you're chiselling it out from the putty.

But you also notice that they're actually

constructed in a sort of brickwork pattern, which is

really important for the structure of the window.

The strength of that stops the lead wanting to fold at that point.

Ah-ha, and what about these ones with this kind of very intense

-texture, these circular ones?

-Yes, these lovely round ones.

These are hand-spun roundels, and they're made just the same

way as a wine glass foot, and you could imagine that this is

the foot of the wine glass and this would be the stem sticking

out here, and they just cut the stem off and leave it as a roundel.

In restoration, some windows just need cleaning, but more often

than not they need more radical surgery.

Sometimes, we do have to completely relead the window, because the lead

has got brittle and old, and it's not doing its supporting any more

of the glass, and so if we're going to do that we have to start off by

making a pattern from this window, and we do that by making a rubbing.

I'm going to put the white paper over the surface,

and then if I rub like this with the side of my crayon...

And then these are the leads coming through.

..I start to get the line of the lead pattern.

-So you make a full-size copy...

-We do.

..like a photocopy but by hand.

Yeah, because we've then got to take the whole thing apart,

and if we took it apart without a pattern

we would be like a jigsaw without the box lid!

-You know, it would be a disaster, really.

-Yes, right.

So use the side, and rub over the surface.

Look at that.

-So here you really see this organic pattern coming through.

-Yes.

Look at that!

It's almost like looking at a fossil of a window or

-something like that, isn't it?

-Yes, that's right.

It's fantastic. It's really good fun!

So, once you've completed the rubbing of the window,

what's the next stage of restoration?

We would then take the window apart in a very painstaking way,

cutting the leads away from the glass, and then we would clean the

glass and lay the whole window out as a jigsaw puzzle on a big board.

It looks, to me, so delicate.

I mean, might you break a piece of historic glass or

-something like that?

-Well, you might, and that does happen.

You know, it does sometimes happen, but you're very,

very careful about how you're doing it.

We also have snips, which are really good,

which can snip through the lead very easily, and you can see

that the lead is like a letter H on its side, and then the glass

slots into those two grooves, and then putty rubbed into this

bit here is very important as well, or else you will have leaky windows.

What were the things that motivated you to get into glass?

What do you enjoy about it so much?

Well, I think the material is a most beautiful thing in itself,

and to be able to use the material to actually express yourself

is quite a special thing, I think, too.

Three years ago, Ralph and Evelyn began one of the biggest

restorations we've seen on this series.

Today, Sandford House has been saved by their efforts.

But the house wasn't finished on our last visit, so one year on,

Kieran's come back to see what progress they've made.

-Hi!

-Oh! How are you?

Hi, Evelyn. Nice to see you, I'm really well.

-Hello, Ralph.

-Good to see you.

-Come on in.

Thank you. It's looking great.

The largest and most impressive room at Sandford is the sunken lounge.

It had proved to be one of the hardest areas to restore,

with its decaying windows, damp walls and problems with the plaster.

-Well. Well, it's done. It's amazing.

-Yeah, yes.

No, it's an absolutely beautiful space,

and you haven't done too much, you haven't filled it with too much.

No, no. I mean, we wanted to still try and keep it

fairly, you know, open.

We don't want to crowd it with lots of different types of furniture

-and so on.

-And yet cosy.

-Cosy, yeah.

And how do you use this room? Because it's a big space, isn't it?

Well, we'd a party a couple of months ago.

-We had 90-odd people here.

-Yes, yes.

Really good, for your 50th and my 60th, it was excellent.

This is a real party room, I can imagine.

-Yes, it was good.

-It has kind of like a banqueting hall feel.

We had people down here and people up there watching what was going on.

We had a band in the window there.

The whole house was just full of people having a great time, and it was brilliant.

It sort of warmed up and woke up, you know,

-after years of slumber, as it were.

-Yes.

-It was good.

The history of the building has always been an important part

of the restoration for Ralph and Evelyn.

Evelyn framed those.

Yeah, these are some old photographs that we got from various sources.

These are fantastic!

They're quite good

cos it's a good history of the house when it was thatched.

It's so nice to have them,

but why is it important to you to have this on the wall?

I just wanted to make a sort of story of, you know,

of the history of it, really.

The biggest changes at Sandford House, one year on, are upstairs.

When we last visited, the bedrooms were still unmade and the

bathrooms just a dream.

Now Evelyn is keen to show Kieran what they've done.

Well, this is great! Isn't it great?

-It's finished at last.

-Yeah.

-It's a lovely room.

How does it feel to have your own bedroom finished?

Oh, it's just fantastic.

I mean, it's so nice to have a lovely big space.

So, tell me which pieces you've added to this space that you're

really happy with.

The wardrobe is the main thing which really is Arts and Crafts style.

These pieces of furniture,

I mean, they really do feel at home here, don't they?

Yeah, it just fits in there.

It's lovely and it's just the right size and style,

and the thing I really like, more than anything, is the stained glass.

-I really love that turquoisey colour.

-This is fantastic, isn't it?

It's lovely.

They've also finished the main bedroom's en suite bathroom,

and there's a guest room down the corridor.

For Evelyn and Ralph, it's been a long and expensive journey.

So far they've spent three years and over £300,000 on this restoration.

But they have saved Sandford House and restored it to its former glory.

I was always told by all the professionals before we started,

we'd never ever make our money back.

It'd be far cheaper buying a bit of ground and building

a beautiful house, but this was a challenge, and I was up for that.

But will their restoration pass inspection

from the Valentine family?

Morag Henderson, the granddaughter of the original owner,

has come to visit.

It feels lovely to be back.

It's quite a long time since I was last here

and it looks amazingly improved.

She was just a child when her grandfather, Harben Valentine,

lived here.

-Look at this! Hello!

-It's lovely to meet you!

-You too.

-Yes.

-This is a wonderful room.

-Oh, yes, it is, yes.

-Wonderful light and airy room.

I had a slight trepidation about somebody from the Valentine family

coming back and seeing the house, in case they...

You know, it would be terrible if they disapproved

of what we had actually done.

It just shows that everybody nowadays lives in their kitchen,

don't they? Whereas in my grandparents' time

they would have...seen the cook once a morning, I suppose.

It's really good to have Morag visit, because she obviously,

you know, knows so much about the Valentine family and the house.

This is probably my grandparents' bedroom.

'You know, I hope in the future we can keep in touch with her.'

I mean, my father might have been born in this room.

You know, I just don't know.

This is very much my grandfather's smoking room.

This is where he would come, either with other men, or by himself

when he wanted to smoke, and I don't think my grandmother wanted

to have all that much to do with it.

It would have been a cosy place to be.

I'm delighted to be here.

It really does feel, you know, like a home again.

I think it's wonderful.

I think that's the steps down to...

Morag has brought along a link with the past, the family photo album.

There's what we called the smoking room, which is

now your lovely new, light room and, as you can see,

-it's slightly masculine but dark.

-Yes, very dark.

But it was fashionable to be dark then, wasn't it?

And there again is the well.

Yes, it's the courtyard with the well. That's amazing!

That's really interesting. It's great to see these.

Most of the photographs I haven't actually seen before.

They're just lovely and they're just really interesting to look at,

because you can really see the way the house was originally designed

and built.

Oh, look, you can see what they've done there with the sort of cobbles.

'She gave us a bit of an insight, I suppose, into what they were'

like as a family, you could imagine them living here as a family

just because of some of the things that, you know, she's talked about.

It looks jolly comfy, doesn't it, and warm?

I just hope it's going to be a family home for many,

many years now.

It deserves it, doesn't it? To be restored and kept.

The restoration isn't finished yet, though.

There's still the holiday cottages and gardens to do.

But the main house has been brought back to life.

It's full of beautiful Arts and Crafts furniture and details.

...and you can't help thinking that Harben Valentine and Baillie Scott

would instantly feel at home here.

-Definitely home.

-Yeah, no, definitely it's a home.

Yeah, definitely.

You can't sort of imagine living anywhere else now, really, can you?

Oh, I don't know.

What do you mean?!

If someone wants to offer me Buckingham Palace!

400 miles away in the village of Southam, Warwickshire,

is number one, Abbey Lane.

This house was almost a ruin when we first saw it two years ago.

For decades it seems to have passed under the radar.

Even though it's thought to date from Tudor times, it had

never been given formal protection as a listed building.

It was in a terrible state.

The last owner had lived here for over 50 years,

and when it was put on the market, it was clear to anyone

who looked that it needed a lot of work.

But locals Sally and Stuart Forgan took up the challenge and paid

£330,000 for the house.

It's a house that we knew.

We lived locally, so we've walked past it.

So we came and had a look and just really loved it.

From the first day that we walked into the building,

we really fell in love with it.

It's really become a sort of passion of ours to bring it back to life.

We've never done anything like this before, never, and, you know,

I think we know that we're quite mad,

because we didn't really think it through before we bought it.

They've budgeted just £150,000 to spend on the restoration.

Whilst it was ongoing, they stayed in their original house.

Two mortgages meant a tight schedule, both time and money.

On top of that, Sally was expecting their second child.

Work started in New Year, 2011.

This is day one, six months after buying it.

Day one is finally here.

Yeah, so the scaffolding goes up today.

The scaffolding's up for 16 weeks, so that's how long they've got.

As long as we can stick to the 16 weeks, that will mean that

everything else can hopefully stick to the schedule and the plumbing

and the lighting and the electrics and everything can go in on time.

So yes, that's the plan.

The first job was to chip away all the render and bricks that

weren't part of the original house.

Builder Pete Ward couldn't believe what he'd found.

We just started to pull this off, and you can see that the

timber underneath is just completely rotten.

This is the sort of thing that makes me cry.

Modern builders putting cement...

over timber and brick,

and the reason the brick here is disintegrating is

because the cement is stopping the brick from breathing.

Under here you can see it's absolutely sopping wet.

As the render and bricks were pulled away, the ancient timber

frame of the house was exposed.

Architectural expert Kieran Long wanted to find out what the

building itself could tell him about its history and when it might

have been built.

It's just so amazing to see it all like a skeleton there,

kind of completely stripped back.

The timber frame is a simple design, rather like series of goal posts

standing parallel to each other and joined by beams.

The problem with having sets of goalposts,

if you imagine that they want to fall that way.

They don't have much stiffness in that direction, so you need to brace

them diagonally, and the interesting thing about this is that you see

lots and lots of office buildings today, for instance, skyscrapers,

built with cross-bracing and it's exactly the same principle.

And down in the cellar, there were clues that Abbey Lane may not

always have been just a house.

You can see that there's some decent quality stone here,

and another thing that has caught my eye is this floor,

because it's brick, very functional, which suggests maybe there was some

kind of use, you know, they wear well, but it's really nicely done.

There's a kind of herringbone pattern here, going round a corner.

To me this cellar gives me

a clue that this building was used for work.

Historian Dr Kate Williams would try and track down what kind of

work had taken place here and who the previous occupants were.

She started her investigation at the Cardall Collection, a local

history archive in Southam.

Chairman Bernard Cadogan had some old pictures of Abbey Lane.

One of the most fascinating ones, I think, is this

one of the chappie on horseback, but you can see he's standing on the

green in front of the house, and at this time the house is all rendered.

-It's probably about 1920s, isn't it?

-Yes, it probably...

Judging from his kind of hairstyle and shoes.

And then we've got another one over here, where we've got again it's...

Rendered again.

..rendered, and it's white, but you see what looks like the pump

in front on the green there and a little lamp, a gas lamp probably.

So the house had been rendered over 100 years ago,

and it was that which had caused many of its problems.

As the work continued at Abbey Lane, it soon became clear that the

restoration was going to take a lot longer than Sally and Stuart

had allowed for.

One thing, though, did remain on schedule -

the birth of Florence Ila Forgan.

So relieved that she's finally here. The last few weeks really dragged.

We didn't know if we were having a boy or a girl,

so it was a nice surprise, another little girl.

But, yeah, really glad it's over!

Four months into the restoration, I made my first visit to Abbey Lane.

In the original plan, the scaffolding was meant to have

come down by now.

They were nowhere near that point yet.

What do you love about the house?

I think that, you know, the history of the house, the history in here,

the sense of history and the wood, you know, this amazing timber here.

-It's very beautiful, isn't it? All wonky.

-Very wonky.

-Just holding up the house.

-Yeah.

So this one here is a structural beam,

but it appears to be just sitting on, what, a cobweb, actually!

A cobweb and a tiny bit of rubble here.

Yeah, there's not a lot. I wouldn't push too much away.

-No. Do you think that might just collapse?

-It might do.

'In fact, the house's main timber frame was in a terrible state.

'About half the rear frame needed to be rebuilt.

'It was a massive job that needed a specialist craftsman, framing

'carpenter Brendan White.

'Brendan had worked on timber framed buildings for nearly 30 years,

'often with English Heritage.'

You've got to prepare yourself, and look around the actual job

and see where it's the most unsafe and go for that one first.

You've got to take a little bit out and put a little bit back in.

Over half the building's surviving timbers were beyond repair,

and had to be completely replaced.

Others were partly rotted just at the ends or on the surface.

I'll only put the new stuff in where I've got no choice to.

Strength-wise, we're going to face a lot of the timbers.

These posts will have to stay. We'll face them where we need to.

The horizontals and verticals, where they're too decayed,

we will replace them completely, put splice in where we have to.

I've worked on a lot worse.

I mean, this now is not as bad as the front, but it looks bad.

It took Brendan and another carpenter more than four weeks

to do the repairs to the front.

Wherever possible, they used traditional methods like wooden

pegs to hold the joints together, so that the new matched the old.

Sally and Stuart were determined to restore the house as

sympathetically as possible.

The infill panels between the timbers were originally

wattle and daub, made of sticks, mud and plaster.

But here, the craftsmen filled them with a mixture of traditional

and modern materials.

Adam Williams used a hi tech fibre board.

It's called Heracliff boarding,

and it's basically a breathable material.

They waterproofed the boarding in the old-fashioned way.

This stuff, it's called caulking.

It's made of hair and it's got a type of grease, oil.

We use this stuff, well, because, basically, it was

used in the ancient years when the houses were first erected.

On the inside, they added a layer of insulation made from sheep's

wool, and then modern plasterboard.

On the outside, they used lime plaster which, unlike modern

plaster, allows the building to breathe.

It's a part of heritage, isn't it?

It's how the old boys used to do it.

But five months into the restoration, Sally and Stuart

had to face some difficult decisions.

They had allowed £150,000 for the whole project, but they'd now

realised that to finish it was going to cost a whole lot more.

At the beginning of the week,

we had a list of jobs and prices for the remainder of the work that was

more than the original budget, which obviously is a bit of a problem!

That would mean it was going to be twice your initial budget, presumably?

Yes, and the house isn't worth the money that we're

spending on it, and we haven't got any more money anyway.

With only a limited budget, Sally and Stuart had a tough decision.

You know, we love it and we want to finish it,

but sometimes it just feels like too much of a problem.

It's just, like, why did we ever start it?

Why didn't we just buy a little tiny house somewhere?

And why didn't you?

Because we loved it, really.

That's the only reason, because we came in

and it felt like somewhere we could make a really nice home.

With only a limited budget, Sally and Stuart had to take a

tough decision.

They stopped the work.

We always knew that, you know, this kind of job is a bit unpredictable,

and we know that there have been things that have cost more

money and taken longer, and we have agreed to those things happening

and, you know, slightly do things differently than the original plan.

But there has always been a finite amount of money,

which we've been quite open about.

It's just really frustrating, because, you know, the guys were

doing a great job, we were happy with the work, it's really exciting.

It's getting to the stage now where everything's coming together,

so to stop now is just really frustrating.

In her research on the history of the house, though, Kate had

made a breakthrough.

In the county archive in Warwick, she was trying to find out

more about the story of Abbey Lane by researching previous owners,

and she found one who could unlock the secrets of the house's cellar.

So what I've got, first of all,

is the Registers of Marriage for the parish at the time,

and we've got here, in 1791, the marriage of Thomas Wood.

So it's Thomas Wood, tanner, of Southam, marrying Mary Miffe

but that's most fascinating cos he's a tanner.

Here's his life, here's his occupation.

If Thomas Wood was a tanner, what did that mean for Abbey Lane?

So what I've got here is the will of Thomas Wood's father,

John Wood, in 1781, and here we are, with Thomas Wood being left

Abbey Lane, and it says here that, "I'm going to leave it to my son,

"together with the yard garden, the backside buildings, the vats,

"kilns, fixtures and appurtenances belonging to the house."

So, you know, this isn't just an ordinary family house,

it actually is a place where work was carried on.

This most likely is a tannery.

Kieran's hunch had been right.

The cellar had been used for work.

There's no evidence of a tannery left at the house now, but

there was a welcome sight.

Builders back at work.

After six weeks of down time, Sally and Stuart had decided that

by taking charge of the restoration themselves, they could

continue with the work in a more cost-effective way.

We've really taken back the project, so we're managing it

ourselves now, which is a bit daunting but loads less stressful.

We know exactly what we're spending. We know where it's going.

We know what things are costing, and it feels a lot better.

But it's really good to see something happening,

people back here.

Brendan, who's the timber framer, he said he'd come back,

and he's brought some people in to work with him, which is

brilliant, so he obviously knows the building really well

and, you know, he's just getting on with things.

At the end of the day, I've started the contract

and I want to finish it. The client's happy with me being here.

The work's great, I can get on with it,

get a few more people involved and we'll go from there.

Inside, Brendan had just one last structural beam to put in,

half a ton of solid oak to support the lounge ceiling.

If it was slipping as we were trying to get it in, it would

obviously do a lot of damage to us

and it might take this side of the wall out and pull the house out.

All right, push it over, kid!

It's not all touching all over.

You see the joint, the half lap, I want it touching top

and bottom, so I have to saw a cut at the bottom,

saw a cut at the top, and then tap it up so it touches everywhere.

I'm not going to cut them, like.

That's it, it's in! This is the turning point now.

That's all the structural work done.

But there was still a very long way to go.

When I made my second visit,

11 months into the build, Brendan was still working on the roof.

He felt their new schedule was optimistic.

-They want to move in for Christmas, but...

-I know.

..I'm saying nothing!

What do you think, really? Realistically.

Realistically, no.

I think they could be in for January, end of January.

-Are you proud of what you've done here?

-Yeah, I am, actually.

-Yeah.

-Yeah.

You should be, because it's looking absolutely incredible.

-I enjoy the building trade. I love building, yeah, so...

-Do you?

Yeah, from day one I was going to be a carpenter, since I was a kid.

It's my dad's fault.

He bought me a tool kit, a carpentry kit when I was about five.

I think he did it because he wanted me

to do all the jobs around the house, cos he's...

I'm just thinking, I'm wondering if I can get my husband one

-for his birthday!

-That's it. Never too old.

As the work headed towards completion, Kieran had been

trying to find out exactly when Abbey Lane had been built.

And the clues were in its timber frame.

The style of timber frame houses changed over time.

So comparing patterns can help establish a date.

Abbey Lane had a distinct design, with upright supports called

studs, arranged parallel downstairs, and a plain box pattern above.

20 miles away, in Stratford upon Avon, Kieran had found a match.

If he was right, then Abbey Lane could have a very famous relative

because this is Hall's Croft, the one-time home of

William Shakespeare's daughter, Suzanna.

Although it's much grander and there are cosmetic differences,

the general pattern is the same, isn't it?

We have this stone foundation, this close studded lower storey,

and then square pattern in the studs on the upper storey.

Perhaps we can confidently now say that Abbey Lane can be

dated from the first or second decades of the 17th century.

400 years and four months later, Abbey Lane, with its Tudor

timber frame, was finally finished, and Sally and Stuart had moved in.

It looks incredible!

It's a bit better than last time. People have been really positive

and we even had a letter from the local civic forum or something,

-saying what a great job we've done for the town, which was nice.

-Oh, that's nice!

-Really nice.

-So the town is appreciative of your efforts.

-Apparently so, yes.

-Let's see if I am. Come on!

When Stuart and Sally bought this house, it was in a terrible state.

The 17th-century building was filled with 20th-century

additions that were damaging it.

Once stripped away, there was virtually nothing left, just

a fragile skeleton.

The living room on the ground floor had some of the most

devastating problems.

The wood had been suffocated by concrete, leaving the original

timber frame in desperate need of help.

The upstairs rooms were barely accessible then, rotten timbers

outnumbering the good. They had come a long way in two years.

This is awe-inspiring!

It's brilliant, and it feels so open and...

I mean, it was open the last time I was here, but it was open

to the elements, and now it's become tranquil and beautiful, hasn't it?

It feels really nice. It's a nice place to be.

Sally and Stuart had done an amazing restoration.

In the living room, the new beams are the backdrop to a modern

family home.

Ah, this is gorgeous, this room!

And upstairs, there is a study, a bathroom and two beautiful bedrooms.

-I love this, Stuart.

-Yeah, we're pleased with that.

Why did you leave that exposed?

Well, we wanted to show some of the original fabric of the house.

It's really wonderful, isn't it,

because it is like a little window into history.

If you and Sally hadn't come along,

what would have happened to Abbey Lane?

Well, it's difficult to say.

I mean, had we not spent the time in taking it right the way

back to the start, you know, I think

the house would have just got into more and more problems.

Yeah. It feels a happy place to be.

It looks beautiful.

Yeah, well, we're pleased.

Now, 12 months later, we've come back to Abbey Lane to see how

Sally and Stuart have got on.

Really?

They moved in over a year ago now, and have made a home for

Scarlett and Florence.

The house is almost finished, but not quite.

The main change here is upstairs.

He's four weeks old.

Esther is their third child and, of course, she's slowed things down a

bit, but the other reason Sally and Stuart haven't finished is money.

They've spent 175,000 so far on this restoration,

£25,000 more than they planned.

If somebody sat you down when you bought a house like this

and said, "This is what it's going to cost you

"in there years you still won't have a kitchen," you wouldn't do it.

Nobody would, because it doesn't make sense.

But it's just as well you don't know exactly what's going to happen,

because otherwise these houses would just all fall down because...

it's crazy, really.

You know, you've spent tens and tens of thousands of pounds

and it's all gone in places where you can't necessarily see it,

but, you know, do we regret spending that money?

Well, no, because it's got us

to a point where we have this lovely house.

Many craftsmen worked on this restoration.

There was one in particular who Sally and Stuart couldn't

have done without.

Brendan was really important because, I mean, he's been here from

the beginning of the restoration on the frame anyway, so he knew

the house, and he just was such a positive person to have around.

He obviously loved his job.

He's excellent at what he does,

and, I mean, he's all over this house.

-Stuart?

-Hello, Brendan!

-Hi!

Brendan hasn't seen Abbey Lane finished and decorated, so

today he's been invited for a visit.

I think up here was my favourite part,

-because this is the first part I finished.

-Yeah, I think...

-For the girls to move in.

-So Florrie's in here.

Look at the chimney!

What a house!

It's lovely to see it finished now and actually furnished and lived in.

Lived in, well, it's definitely lived in!

Huh, that's lovely!

-This is the best room.

-Some beautiful beams in here.

So this ends up being the play room, and everybody-in-it room.

I'm still dubious about the chimney you painted pink.

Oh, apparently, I've got to paint

the rest of the wall pink now, she says.

-I remember you said that to me.

-It could have been worse.

Like, when you said to me, "I'm sorry, I've had to paint that pink", I went, "OK."

-No, I think the whole wall...

-I think it looks lovely.

I think it sets it off as it is! I think it sets off the girl's room.

This is the bit I remember most, when the roof was off and that

looked like it wouldn't even survive and now I just love it up here.

Yeah, we love it already. We loved it when we bought it.

It feels lovely to be back, actually.

It's a lovely house, but it needs to be a home,

cos that's what it's all about.

It's Sally and Stuart's house, really.

Three years after they'd begun this ambitious project, Stuart and

Sally are ready to begin the final push to finish Abbey Lane.

The foundations have been laid for a rear extension, and they plan

to start building their dream kitchen, a garage and a

garden at the back soon.

It's all quite exciting again, now it's got going again,

because it means not only having a kitchen,

but it also means that we can do the garden and we can, you know,

fence it in, so the girls can be out there and it'll be much safer.

I can't wait. Really excited!

But for now, Sally and Stuart are encouraged by the letters of

support from viewers, and praise from local groups.

We had lots of visitors and lots of letters

and then people in the town that have, you know, remembered

when they were little and all sorts of things about coming to play

in the fields where the flats are now, all sorts of things like that.

The house, obviously, has been here forever,

and nobody was noticing it before, so it's lovely that

people are actually noticing it and enjoying it like we do.

Next time, we revisit The Elms, a Georgian restoration in

Derbyshire, and uncover a love story and a scandal.

We used to go to The Elms, my dad and I, every Wednesday,

but my mum wasn't allowed to go.

Hello!

In North Yorkshire, we find out why Coulton Mill has become

a local attraction.

I'd come outside and there would be ten cars parked out here.

"Can we just have a look around? Can we see the wheel?"

And we'll meet the craftsmen who helped save these restoration homes.

I couldn't do my job without these tools, and they symbolise

stonemasonry going back thousands and thousands of years.