Coldbrook Farm and Old Manor Restoration Home - One Year On

On the last series of Restoration Home,

we followed the stories of six historic buildings

that desperately needed saving.

Yeah, we love it, we want to finish it,

but sometimes it just feels like it's 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. It 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.

Wow. Well, it's done.

Got the house.

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

We'll meet the crafts people

whose work helped save these historic homes.

And the people who's stories provide a living link to the past.

That's amazing.

Set deep in the beautiful Monmouthshire countryside

in South Wales is Coldbrook Farm.

Two years ago, it looked like any other rundown farmhouse.

But inside, there was some exceptional Tudor timberwork,

that in the past had earned it a grade two listing.

The farmhouse was owned by Bill Parry and Kim Harris.

During the week, they lived and worked in London,

but for the past 12 years, they'd used Coldbrook as a weekend home.

-Who's the sheepdog?

-Me!

Bill grew up here. In fact, on the farm next door.

Right. Come on, Kim. Hurry up. Go and get the sheep. Hey!

He and Kim had always wanted to restore Coldbrook

and turn it into their family home.

You got 'em, Finny. Whoa!

I've lived in London long enough and I feel,

especially with the kids getting older, schooling,

and I just want the kids to be able to run around in the fields.

And I feel as though I'm coming home. This is the family farm.

My father's still here, my uncle's farm is up there,

another uncle's farm is there. I feel,

coming back to where I belong.

Where are they going?

We don't want 'em going in the house, do we?

But for Kim and Bill, there was more to Coldbrook Farm

than just a new home in the country.

Over the years

they had been picking away at the 20th century additions in the house

to see what lay beneath.

This room looked very different. Completely different.

It was all shiny white concrete walls.

So, nothing, none of this stone or anything was exposed.

All these beams were covered up.

As each layer came away,

they began to realise how special their farmhouse was.

It was going to have to be a careful restoration and modernisation.

They budgeted £350,000.

Work started in spring 2011.

The restoration was scheduled to last for eight months,

so the family could move in by mid-October.

The historic timberwork was powder blasted

to strip off centuries of paint and grime.

While up on the roof, all the tiles were removed,

so the 16th century roof structure could be repaired.

I came to visit a few weeks after work had started.

'Approaching Coldbrook, it's easy to forget there's more to this

'place than the average farm.'

Oh, this room.

'That is until you go inside.'

I've never seen beams like this.

We've been told that in the 16th century

when we believe these beams were installed that it would have

taken one man one year to carve the whole beam.

-What is this room? Was this used for something?

-Well, yeah, yeah.

You know, to put beams in that took one year to build

and all of these doors...

The average farmer wouldn't have done that, I wouldn't have thought

-In the 16th century.

-No.

So why does it have such an ornate room like this one?

'For their restoration, Bill and Kim were planning to add some

'very extravagant woodwork of their own.

'A new staircase that would go from the living room all the way

'up to the attic.'

The original staircase sort of came up here and went up like that

and we're going to have... The new one is carved oak, sort of spiral,

sort of spiralling round with a glass panel here.

Spirals up to the first floor, a glass panel round

and it'll spiral up again to the second floor.

-Is it really expensive?

-It is expensive.

-Yes.

-Do you know what it's going to cost?

-Well, yes.

-Yeah. I know very well.

-Are you going to tell?

-Yeah.

-Are you going to tell me though?

I'm embarrassed to tell you that it's going to

cost £25,000 to put in some steps to go upstairs.

'Outside the house there are working farm buildings used every day

'by Bill's dad Brian.'

How do you feel about him doing it up?

Well, it's a great stuff, isn't it?

Yeah, he's a bit thoughtful.

Because I just thought they were going to spoil Coldbrook

by knocking it about cos I liked it as it was.

But now I can see, you know, the gift of it

and I think they've got a good architect doing what should be done.

Inside the house, though, the plans were causing problems for

some of the trades.

With most of the beams being left exposed

and the stone walls bare,

where was electrician Jack Lloyd supposed to hide his cables?

It's just giving me a headache.

You just have to run one cable which should take ten minutes

but, you know, you look at the drawing,

you speak to the foreman and he says it can't go that way.

It's a nightmare. It's just tricky, you know.

As the builders brought the house into the 21st century,

we were trying to dig up all we could about its past.

Historian Dr Kate Williams would search the archives to track

down the people whose lives have been bound up with the house,

while architectural expert Kieran Long was looking for clues

in the building itself.

He started in the grandest room.

Wow, look at this.

It's like walking into a kind of Tudor fantasy somehow.

Like these huge dark timbers and this amazing oak screen here.

And we even have pointed doorways. You know, that kind of gothic point.

I mean, it's just like stepping into another era here. It's fantastic.

What I love about this is

how excessive it looks to our eyes today.

We're so used to seeing the kind of pathetic little

architraves that we have around doors in our own homes.

And, you know, that's the kind of fading memory

of something like this.

I mean, look at the size of it and the heft of it.

I mean, it's two huge bits of tree stuck together and then carved.

But what was all this lavish carved timberwork doing here?

And exactly how old was it?

Kieran asked Dr Dan Miles from the Oxford Dendrochronology Lab

to find out.

Dendrochronology is the science of dating wood

using the tree's growth rings.

Each year, the tree will put on one ring on the outside,

just under the bark.

And if it's a very dry year, that'll be a very narrow ring

cos the tree didn't grow much.

But if it's a really good year, warm and moist,

the tree will grow much faster, put on a much wider ring.

We actually have to measure each ring, put it on a graph

and put it through statistical analysis on the computer.

And if we have the edge of the bark, which we've got here,

then we'd actually be able to work out the season of the year

the tree was cut down.

Dan took wood core samples that he could analyse back at the lab.

If they could discover when the house was built, it could

help solve the mystery of Coldbrook farm -

why some of the finest carved timberwork in Wales was in

an ordinary farmhouse, well off the beaten track.

Five months into the restoration, Kim and Bill held a site meeting

with their architects,

Martin Hall and his partner and wife Kelly Bednarczyk.

They had to make decisions on the stain colour

for the new floorboards.

Kim favoured the lighter ones.

My position is strong. It is strong.

I do want to feel supported.

And I like that but I need to sell it to Bill.

-Bill, isn't this by far and away the nicest?

-Compared to what?

Oh, all of these? Which one's the nicest, Kim?

Tell me which one's nicest. Oh, that one. Yeah, you're right.

HE CHUCKLES

-No, I prefer this one.

-You think that, don't you, Kelly?

I think that was my personal favourite, the antique one.

I think... Are we painting this white?

White and that, you could be in almost a modern house somewhere.

I want to live in an old house not a modern house.

It's too sanitised with lovely white, you know,

clean, bright floorboards and white walls.

No-one could be persuaded to go for the antique?

Do you know? A while ago, about last year, I was all over that.

-But it's the whole dark thing.

-But the joinery here is dark.

-I know.

Exactly.

The floorboards that we chose today weren't the floorboards that

I wanted to choose at all.

But everyone's right and they are quite nice.

It's just they're a bit dark, which is... I wanted everything to

be as light as possible cos the house is quite dark.

But they are right,

they should really be dark to fit in with all the wood.

And they'll be beautiful.

The next decision was the doors.

They all had to be custom made because every doorway in

the house was a different size.

We sent them off to the joinery company to get priced and they've

come back with prices and it's not an exaggeration to say the prices

are basically double the provisional sum that's in the contract.

-How much over? In total, how much over is it?

-Yeah.

-In total.

Well, I guess it'd be pretty much 100% over.

The doors were expensive

but not as dear as the architect-designed staircase.

It was being built by master joiner Sam Thomas.

I have made a lot of staircases and probably, as my time as a joiner,

probably a couple of thousand maybe, but nothing quite like this.

Sometimes it's a lot easier to draw something than to make something.

Architects try and make their own design

and their own thing on something but it's not easy to get there.

Some nights, I do go home and think about what I'm going to do

the next day and how I'm going to go about it, yes.

Sometimes I wished he'd pay me for my time at home as well then,

put it that way.

80 miles away at the Oxford Dendrochronology Lab,

Dr Dan Miles had been analysing the timber cores he took in order

to discover exactly when Coldbrook was built.

He had an answer.

We can show that the house was probably built, probably in 1538

because the tree was still growing that winter.

The tree was probably cut down during the winter of 1537-8

and were used probably right away.

Although the great big tree used for those big window jambs were

cut down a couple of years before, in 1535-6.

Having a precise build date of 1538

was a significant discovery for this Tudor building

and meant it could have had a very illustrious connection.

Richard Suggett is from

the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Wales.

It's very interesting.

Coldbrook, like so many vernacular houses, is a documentary blank.

There's just nothing there.

And yet the house says, you know, the person who built it was

a person of consequence.

So I think you can start making some reasonable

speculations about the identity of the builder.

It's very near Raglan and we know that the Earl of Pembroke,

who died in 1469, had a lot of illegitimate children whom

he settled on various estates and I think it's quite possible,

although not susceptible to proof yet, that the people who

built Coldbrook were actually descended from the Earl of Pembroke.

So, yes, quite extraordinary.

Raglan Castle was owned by William Herbert,

the First Earl of Pembroke.

The castle is just two miles from Coldbrook Farm.

So if the farmhouse was built for one of the earl's illegitimate

children, that might explain all the fine carved timber.

Historian Kate Williams now had a lead to follow.

In the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth, she researched

the Herbert family - the Earls of Pembroke

who lived at Raglan Castle in the 15th century.

In front of me, I've got two family trees rather different.

One of all the legitimate children of the Herberts

and one of the illegitimate children of the Herberts.

So here we've got the Earl of Pembroke,

his son and then all their many illegitimate children.

But unlike quite a lot of other aristocratic families

the illegitimate children, the natural sons of course,

not the daughters, are taken into the circle of inheritance.

They all become of places,

they all are, say, Edward Herbert OF somewhere.

So they gain a house, they gain an estate, they gain land.

Even though they're just natural sons, they get a great stature.

Kate couldn't find a paper trail back to Coldbrook Farm so

the idea that it was built

for one of the earl's illegitimate sons wasn't proved.

It would have to remain just conjecture.

Check if they're level.

After nine weeks in the workshop Sam Thomas had brought

the spiral staircase to Coldbrook to assemble it.

But it looked like there had been a terrible mistake.

We started doing... Set out really, marked things where we needed

to mark things and get things in place and this is going to

be our first bit but there is a problem with this.

And there's a slight issue with the floor, which is not what

measurements I had, you know, to what we made,

to what is here at the moment.

In other words, it didn't fit.

The first flight was too tall.

It's about 70mm, to be fair.

So, yeah, it's quite a big issue to get over as well.

With hundreds of man hours already invested in the stairs,

Sam hoped that the architect could come up with a solution

apart from remaking it all from scratch.

Down in London it was moving day.

The children were starting new schools in Wales and,

as Kim and Bill were keeping their jobs, they were planning to commute

back to the city for a few days each week.

A little bit of me is slightly concerned that I might start feeling

a bit sort of isolated down there but I'm not that worried about that.

Keep me out of trouble.

Coldbrook wasn't finished yet.

Until it was, the family would live in a caravan on site.

-We are emigrating. Fantastic.

-Have you got the passports?

-Yeah.

Another economic migrant returns home. Here we go.

THEY LAUGH

At Coldbrook Farm there had been some good news about the stairs.

They did fit.

It turned out it was the floor that was wrong.

It was meant to be raised but no-one had got round to it

by the time the stairs arrived.

There's always the risk with something which is made

off-site in this way and is totally...

totally fits together in this way that

you could have created the world's most expensive pile of kindling.

And I'm obviously hugely pleased that that isn't what's happened.

This wasn't the final finish of the wood.

Sam still had weeks of work to do applying an oak veneer.

But when that was done, Bill and Kim would find out if mixing

modern design with an historic house really was a good idea.

This is Raglan Castle,

the ancestral home of the Earls of Pembroke.

With Kate drawing a blank in the archive, Kieran was trying to

establish a link between here and the farm.

So we've been searching the castle, in a way, for references,

architectural references that might lead us

to a comparison with Coldbrook and I think I've found one.

I mean, this doorway upstairs, we know there was once a dining room

right above here in the castle and the doorway is strikingly similar.

You know, you could imagine that, in Coldbrook Farm, the craftsmen

were looking at this kind of decoration and reproducing it

with the materials they had to hand, which was, of course, timber.

So it's not definitive proof

and it certainly doesn't mean that the same craftsmen worked here

and in Coldbrook but there's definitely an influence,

there's a kind of idiom of gothic castle architecture

from the 14th and 15th century

that is somehow finding its way through to Coldbrook Farm.

'One year after Kim and Bill started the restoration of Coldbrook Farm,

'I went to see how they'd got on.'

-Lovely to see you. It looks fantastic.

-Thank you.

-Are you thrilled?

-Yes.

-Yeah.

-We're thrilled.

-We finally got there.

When they started this restoration, the house was worn out and broken.

Fireplaces were in danger of collapse, Tudor timbers were

being eaten away and the whole place desperately needed modernisation.

Kim! The staircase!

-Yeah. It looks great.

-Yes.

Do you like it, Bill?

I... Against all my will, I love it, yeah.

Well worth it, actually. Well worth the money spent on it.

I love it. I love the way it ties in the wood,

the old wood and the kind of modern use of the house.

-Yeah. And it doesn't take over.

-No.

-It sits on the side of the wall.

Yeah. It's really lovely.

The stairs go all the way up to the attic, where Kim and Bill's bright

and stylish bedroom had been created under the ancient roof timbers.

The children's bedrooms are on the first floor...

..where there's also a guest bedroom and a big family bathroom.

'White walls throughout tie everything together,

'as do the new oak floorboards,

'stained dark to blend in with the old timber.'

-Kim, these floors, you wanted a lighter floor.

-Yes.

-I always wanted light floors but everybody else opposed me.

-Did they?

-Yes! Everyone. So I thought, "Fair enough."

-Are you happy?

Probably right. Yeah, I was just very keen on getting as much

light in here as possible and... But, no, they were right.

Everyone's right as usual.

'Also designed to match the old timbers were the custom made doors.'

-Bill?

-Yes.

-How much did this door cost?

-Well, too much.

-Not £1,000.

-Something not far off it. Yeah.

-You've got a lot of doors.

You must have spent all your money on doors.

Yeah, but I was quite pleased to do that.

I really enjoyed that bit of it.

THEY LAUGH

'But the most impressive timberwork was in the room

'with the Tudor beams that was now Kim and Bill's dining room.'

Oh, the historical part of the home.

It's delightful.

Is it very different from living in a sort of modern London home?

It's fabulous having all these sort of features around

and the wood is very comforting

but we do have a lot of mod cons in here that we've never had before.

'And most of those mod cons were in the room

'that used to be the old barn next door,

'which has now been completely transformed into a very

'stylish farmhouse kitchen...

'..but also included a mezzanine play area

'to keep the kids close by.'

I love the fact that from here I can see the old beams and the wood

and then this, you know, shiny bit of modern technology

and all that, out to the sort of ancient view.

I think it's just... It actually makes me feel quite jealous.

The restoration of Coldbrook was originally budgeted at £350,000.

In the end, the final bill was nearer 400.

It's now a year since

the restoration of Coldbrook Farm was finished

and Kim, Bill and the family have settled in to their rural life.

I'm surprised at how quickly it has become home or...

Straightaway it felt like home.

Everywhere you walk around the house,

there's something nice to look at.

Every window's got a great view and the rolling hills

and the sunsets and the space.

And the stairs are lovely

so every time I walk up the stairs I think, "Gosh, what nice stairs."

The modern stairs are one of the most striking features

of the restoration.

They were built at this workshop by master joiner Sam Thomas.

It took him and his colleague 700 hours

to make the complicated structure.

And to begin with, Bill wasn't impressed.

I do remember when I turned up there to fit it

and it was all in bits on the back of our truck, and we'd

taken it off the truck and we'd laid it out on the floor in there

and his face was a picture to me

cos he walked in and he sort of, "Well, is that it?"

And I said, "Yeah," and he said... Well, he just couldn't believe it,

that that was going to be it and it was all in little bits on the floor.

But, yeah, it was amusing.

Well, the design of that staircase I thought was very different

and very unusual for an old place like that.

It's quite modern for something that old.

But it turned out all right in the end.

I think it looked real good in there, to be fair.

As a craftsman himself, Sam was also impressed by the joinery

the Tudor chippies had put in the house.

I'm amazed by them.

I'm amazed by how they achieved the things they achieved with

so little to what we have today.

The main beams in one of the rooms was a big focal point of the house.

Well, to do that today would be... amazing really. Difficult to do.

You know, even with the machines we've got here,

it'd be a lot of handwork and, yeah, I take my hat off to them guys

cos that is real clever stuff.

Sam has been a joiner for over 30 years.

'It does take a long time.

'Yeah, you just don't get good over two or three years

'although that's all your apprenticeship is.

'It takes you 20, 30 years. I'm still learning now as today.

'It just takes time and just keep learning all the time.'

Why do I do it? Well, I love my job. I always loved my job.

I enjoy it very much.

'Some jobs are really satisfying. Some are not.

'But the good outweigh the bad most of the time.

'I think that's why we just love it.'

Seeing your product at the end of the day

when somebody else appreciates it, as well.

Like the stairs at Coldbrook.

It wasn't appreciated right at the beginning

but I think right at the end it was, which was well good.

Made my day, that did.

Bill's dad Brian had worked the farm at Coldbrook for over 50 years.

He's pleased that the house has finally been restored.

Being a country boy, it was hard to visualise all that they were

going to do but it came right in the end.

Whoa.

Plenty of room for the children to run about and play.

As long as the youngsters are pleased with it,

that's all that matters, isn't it? It's their future. Not mine.

We are living on a working farm, without doing all the hard work,

obviously, but that's the great thing, isn't it?

-Yeah, it's great. You love watching people work.

-Yes, I do!

Nothing better.

In any restoration,

there's always something that doesn't turn out quite as planned.

At Coldbrook, it was the floorboards.

Kim had never liked the dark stain on them so, whilst Bill was away,

she asked the builders to sand them back to their original light colour.

No, I wasn't here when we had a dramatic change of floor colour

but I went off for a few days working and leaving nice

dark floorboards and I came back and they were all light.

It was just so dark. So I'm pleased that I'm right.

THEY LAUGH

Kim's eye for design hasn't been missed by her children.

Mummy cares about the house because she decided where we had to sleep,

how...where the chairs and stuff were going,

where the TV was going and she decided everything, really.

Both Bill and Kim are still in their old jobs.

They can work from home for some of the time but both have to

spend a few days a week in London.

It is a bit hectic sometimes. It is a bit.

A little bit stressful but, on the whole, it's excellent.

Feels like we've got the best of both worlds.

It's nice to see everyone in the office.

It's nice to go out to meetings.

It's nice to go around on the Tube and see the West End.

It's nice to do all that and then it's just nice coming back as well.

So it works well.

Both have family locally who help with childcare and neither of

them have any regrets about their decision to restore Coldbrook Farm

and move to the country.

-It's lovely. We love it.

-Yeah, love it.

-Love it. It's great.

Really great. I can't believe it actually.

Can't believe that we live here.

I feel a bit... Not embarrassed but I feel a bit spoilt by living in,

you know, such a nice house and so it's not really me.

You know, we've never really lived in a nice house before

so it's taken a bit of getting used to, really.

Our next restoration home is Old Manor, a Grade II listed

house in the Central Norfolk village of Saham Toney.

When we first visited two years ago,

Old Manor was on its last legs -

full of damp...

..woodworm and deathwatch beetle.

You'd have thought this was the last restoration project

anyone would consider taking on.

But solicitor Polly Grieff and her French husband Erich

fell in love with the place.

That beam up there, look.

You can see it's got some kind of a mould on it.

That needs changing.

When you walk into a house, sometimes there are friendly houses

and there are unfriendly houses and this one is a friendly house.

It's a bit like a sort of little old lady waiting for a face-lift

and we're coming in to make her better.

-An expensive face-lift.

-Yeah.

I shall never be able to afford one for myself once I've paid for this.

A lot of the building looked like it needed far more serious surgery.

-This is rotten.

-Is it crumbly? Oh, God.

'The world thinks I'm completely mad

'but sometimes you've just got to go with your heart.'

If you're taking on a challenge, you might as well take on a big one.

-That was made the day you were born.

-Oh, thank you, sir.

Thank you so much. And as you are older than I am...

Toad!

Polly paid £400,000 to buy Old Manor.

The plan was to sell their Liverpool home and move to Norfolk

because this was where her family originally came from.

Her son Max lives locally.

He's a builder and he worried that Old Manor's pebble-dashed walls

were hiding some very bad news.

Unfortunately, in the '60s, this greyer stuff is the concrete render

that the '60s people decided to spoil the house with,

which is not allowing the oak beams to breathe.

They've all got dry rot and woodworm

and everything due to the fact that they put this on.

Some of those problems were already evident

in the oak-panelled Jacobean dining room.

I've loved this room ever since I first saw it. Needs attention.

Over on the other side of the room it's got deathwatch beetle in it.

So I want to save this. It's got drawing pins in it.

It's been battered.

It's been generally knocked about a lot

but it's still very, very beautiful.

Polly's restoration of the Old Manor wasn't going to come cheap.

We're looking to spend between £200,000 and £300,000 to get

it to be the sort of splendid house that it's going to be in the end.

Erich was retired and on a modest pension.

So Polly was the main breadwinner.

She was relying mainly on her income to fund and drive

the restoration forward.

But it wouldn't be enough to see the whole project through.

If we can sell the house in Liverpool then that's fine,

I've got enough to cover it. But it's juggling the financial balls

and keeping them all in the air while getting this project

finished which is going to be the major problem I can see.

As Polly wrestled with the finances, architectural expert Kieran Long

began his investigation of Old Manor by seeing what

the building itself could tell him.

Well, it doesn't look that special in some ways.

It's a bit of a pebble-dashed haunted house.

But there are already some things that are really

interesting about it.

These fantastic chimney stacks. They're really spectacular.

We've got this kind of typical suburban pebble-dashing and then in

front of us here, in a way,

something that is unmistakably ancient fabric.

This, you know, could be 16th century,

perhaps even older than that.

You can tell by the proportions of the door first of all.

People were shorter. It's as simple as that.

So if this is 500 years old,

the average height of a farmer in Norfolk would probably be

a head shorter than me so this would have been fine.

But it was on the other side of the house, where the modern

concrete render had fallen away and exposed original timbers,

that Kieran found the clearest evidence that Old Manor started its

life as a medieval building.

Perhaps, at first glance, you might expect this to be a brick house

that's been rendered, been pebble-dashed.

But, no. Much older style of construction with a timber frame and

this adobe wall, as you can see,

sort of falling to pieces, this mud wall.

Now that puts this back in the 15th or 16th century

in terms of construction.

There's not a lot of stone in Norfolk so this was

the kind of typical construction of that era for this part of the world.

Over the centuries, Old Manor had been altered and added to.

And inside the house there was a curiosity -

a stained glass window that looked as though

it belonged to a religious building.

To me, this is kind of an incredible survival

and something really, really precious and beautiful.

But the mystery was how

this beautiful piece of stained glass ended up here.

The restoration of Old Manor got under way in the summer of 2011.

The first job was to remove the old roof tiles so they could

inspect the timbers.

It meant erecting scaffolding over the whole house.

With Polly's dream family home shrouded in weatherproofing,

I paid my first visit.

We've got to get the plastic over to take the roof off.

We've got to get the plastic over to get the rendering off.

So the scaffolding being up is the real kick-off point.

This is where it actually really begins.

But there was no actual restoration possible yet.

'Polly was still at the stage of investigating what might be

'wrong with the place she'd bought.'

This is a massive undertaking for you

cos you could buy land. You could come home to Norfolk,

buy land and a nice simple house that you could do quite quickly

but you've decided to plough all your energy into this because...?

This house just called to me.

I must have looked at about 2-300 houses easily when I came down.

I just don't know. I just saw it and I wanted it.

And I saw it and I fell in love with it

and I thought, "This is the house that I want to make home."

'Originally, Polly thought the total cost of the restoration would

'be between £200,000 and £300,000.

'But as the builders started to assess the extent of the work

'that would be needed, she had to think again.'

Did you pay £400,000 for the house?

-For the house.

-For the house and the plot of land it sits in.

-Yes.

-And what's your budget, Polly?

I shan't be cutting my throat

if I have to pay the purchase price over again.

-OK.

-But at the moment it'll cost what it costs.

I have money set aside and fortunately I also have a job which

will pay me sufficient to be able to carry on putting money aside.

I'm glad that you are looking at it in those terms

because I think it is going to take a lot of money

because it's very detailed, very beautiful, complex.

It's fragile.

Historian Kate Williams wanted to find out when Old Manor

might have been built.

At the Norfolk archives, in an antiquarian volume,

she discovered that, in the Middle Ages, the land in Saham Toney that

Old Manor stands on was called something different.

This is a completely new name here, Page's Manor, and I think it's

pretty interesting because Old Manor stands on Page's Lane, so it

seems very much as if Page's Manor is the same place as the Old Manor.

Looking at later documents, Kate learnt that by the 17th century

the land had a house on it called Page's Place.

But it's not clear when the name changed to Old Manor.

Back at the restoration, the roof of the house had been stripped bare...

..and the concrete render on the walls was being prised off to get

a closer look at the timbers that had been suffocating behind it.

It wasn't good news.

The builders were finding more damage by deathwatch beetle,

whose larvae eat their way through timber.

That is what deathwatch beetle does.

Basically turns wood into honeycomb.

Just falls apart in your hands.

That just chews through all the wood.

Old Manor was now at its most vulnerable.

Stripped of its roof and walls, it was just the skeleton of

the old Tudor house it had started its life as.

Inside, though, there were puzzles to the building's history that

Kieran wanted to solve.

The beautiful stained glass windows

were out of character in this old house.

So how did they get there?

Kieran went to meet stained glass expert David King

at St Peter Mancroft Church in nearby Norwich.

One of the main reasons, of course, we've come to talk to you about this

is this picture, which is from the Old Manor, of what we

always thought looked like a piece of medieval stained glass

but had no idea where it might have come from.

I think you have to go to the church where I think it comes from.

-Oh, really? Right.

-And that will give us some historical background,

-which will help.

-So you think you know the precise location

-where this was taken?

-I think I do. Yes. I've got a picture here,

a black and white photograph of some of the window

in Great Cressingham Church, which is not far from the Manor House.

And I think that this panel here comes from that place there

because this glass doesn't belong there.

-Right.

-And it's a different style.

One thing you need to know about this is that it's inside out.

It does happen that glass gets put inside out.

So somebody just found it attractive,

wanted to knock together a bit of a surround for it

-and didn't think about which way it was facing?

-Not quite. No.

So when this was the other way round, it was a matching figure

-to this one and they were stood facing each other.

-I see.

The two bishops, they stood facing each other

and that's where I think it came from, that panel there.

Great Cressingham Church is just a few miles east of Saham Toney.

So was David correct?

Could this be the place where Old Manor's stained glass

originally comes from?

It's so extraordinary, really, to stand here

and be in front of the window that David King pointed us to.

They're the six openings which once held six bishops

and they still do but we can see that the third from the left

opening contains a different kind of bishop.

This is clearly a replacement

and this is the very spot where Old Manor's bishop once was.

And we know that because, just as David described to us, it mirrors

precisely the form of the bishop on the opposing fourth opening.

But the biggest mystery was how did the glass get

from Cressingham Church to Old Manor?

Back at the site, the contractors had uncovered a major problem.

With all the concrete pebble dash removed, site manager Nick

realised the whole building needed underpinning.

The house was constructed onto,

like, a compressed sand and flint base.

It stood the test of time but, because we're pulling the house

apart, we've now freed up a lot of timbers and walls which would enable

it to move a little bit more than what it originally would have done.

The underpinning was going to cost £30,000 and would mean move delays.

Until it was finished, the real work of restoration couldn't begin.

Polly, working flat out in her job as a solicitor,

was counting the cost in time and money.

I suppose I've spent about £100,000 so far

and, to be honest, it doesn't look like a house any more.

It's just like a chimney with a whole load of sticks around it.

So it's not terribly impressive for the amount I've laid out.

But you have to do the underpinning, you have to do

the treatment of the wood but it does seem to be that it's costing

a fortune and I've got nothing there to show for it but a skeleton house.

My whole future is invested in the Norfolk house

and it's just frustrating that it's going so incredibly slowly

and it's costing so very much.

You get a vision, you start working and then it starts hitting

you in the pocket and it hurts a lot more than you think it's going to.

In the new year, Old Manor was still waiting for

a way out of its troubles.

The house in Liverpool remained unsold and, with Erich retired,

the main financial strain was falling on Polly.

She's paying two mortgages, which are enormous,

but she would never show it.

-Even to you?

-Not even to me, you know?

-We do have arguments.

You cannot marry a Frenchman and not have an argument with

a Frenchman but, you know, we always find out the solution to everything.

There's no going back now for you, as a family, is there?

You've got to finish this house because you can't sell it.

No, we have to finish it. We have to finish it and it will be finished.

It looks bad but it's not that bad. It's not that bad, you know.

-I've seen worse. You know, I've seen worse.

-Have you, Erich?

-Yes.

Because I've seen a lot of houses

and that one looks pretty frail to me.

Come and see that. Come. Come.

But where I saw frailty in the old beams,

Erich saw something different.

Do you know, without the walls, without the roof,

you can still see how beautiful it could look?

Look at the top one. Doesn't it look like a boat?

-It does look like a boat.

-Look.

They all need replacing but, you know, it's there.

You've got the skeleton. Now you just have to put the skin on it.

And that's it. And he walks.

Erich and Polly's enthusiasm for this project had seen them

overcome problem after problem.

So it was difficult to believe that Old Manor could possibly have

another set back in store.

Two weeks after my visit, Polly's son Max discovered there'd been

a break-in at the house.

Someone, we're not sure who, has come in during the evening

when no-one's here.

They've put holes in the ceilings in pretty much each room.

A whole wall supporting part of the solid oak staircase had been

kicked in by vandals.

There was a wall coming to here and this is now levitating.

The whole floor here for the stairs is now not safe at all

so if anyone stands on there it's broken.

It's just the sheer mindless idiocy of people who come in with no

intent other than to do damage which I can't understand and,

having spoken to various people in the village,

no-one else understands either.

It makes us more determined than ever to get this house into

a state where we can actually live in it and make it beautiful again.

The police investigated, but to cap all their misfortune,

with the Liverpool house still unsold,

Polly had finally run out of money...

..and all the building work was stopped.

Two months later, I came for my final visit.

Still wrapped in scaffolding nine months after it went up,

this fascinating old house was far from complete.

How are you?

Looking at it, nothing's changed really, has it?

Not a lot.

-You could have built a new house...

-Yes.

..for the amount of money and time you've put into this.

You probably would have spent less and, well, you'd certainly

be in by now if you'd built a new house, wouldn't you?

-Oh, yes. Oh, yes.

-But that's not what we set out to do.

We set out to renovate an old building

and to do our bit for the sort of evolution of it.

It's better not to hurry it. We're only in our 50s.

You know, we've got another 50 years to live.

I don't think I've got another 50 years for the revisit

though, Erich, so trot on!

THEY LAUGH

'Erich was as determined as Polly to see this massive project completed.

'And as I saw the damage done from the break-in, for the first time,

'I could see why they were both deeply affected by it.'

They've actually done quite a lot of damage here.

-How does it make you feel, Erich?

-I'm very angry

because it's like attacking the roots of a family, you know?

It's an old house, it's got some history and it should be respected.

'Polly's beloved panel room wasn't spared either.'

I'm so sorry, Polly.

-It's really a shame. I'm so sorry.

-Well, life is like that.

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

-So this is all new, isn't it?

-Yes.

-This underpinning.

Yeah, that's the thousands

and thousands of pounds' worth of underpinning.

It doesn't look much, does it?

It doesn't look much but it is holding the room up.

It's one small victory, if you like, in a catalogue of half-victories.

It's all good.

I come in here when I want to recharge my batteries, if you like.

How do you remain so upbeat

when everything around you is literally collapsing?

There is no point in getting down-hearted.

I know. I know. I understand that.

There is no point but, you know,

I've been there myself and even though

you know there's no point in getting, you still do get down-hearted.

And you don't seem to be affected by it.

Well, no, I suppose it may well be genetic.

I'm a glass-three-quarters-full girl. Always have been, really.

Old Manor was at its lowest ebb and it was going to need more

than Polly's unshakeable enthusiasm to save it.

What it needed was money. And lots of it.

That was 12 months ago and, when the programme was first broadcast,

it was a shock for one viewer.

Ronnie Mareheart realised that her family had owned Old Manor

150 years ago,

and her hobby could help solve a mystery.

I thought, "Well, William Grigson that lived there was a vicar,"

and I knew he had something to do with Cressingham Church or

one of his family had something to do with Cressingham Church.

Ronnie's interested in genealogy and she's been researching her

family tree in Norfolk.

I've always lived in the past. I'm not a modern person.

The past has always fascinated me. I liked history at school.

I wasn't a lot of good at it but I loved it.

Ronnie had traced her family, the Grigsons, back to Old Manor

in the village of Saham Toney in the mid-19th century.

In those days, the house was called Page's Place.

The programme brought her research to life.

Watching it, knowing in my mind that years ago our family lived there.

There was a room with old panelling in.

Well, you'd imagine that would have been there when they were there.

And it's quite funny sitting there and visualising,

although I've never seen a photograph or portrait or anything

of these people, but visualising them in that sort of environment.

It's really quite strange.

Quite strange but nice to see where they used to live.

Watching the programme made Ronnie realise that she might be

able to help solve the mystery of how a stained glass panel

from Cressingham Church ended up in Old Manor.

The Reverend William Grigson that bought Page's Place,

his nephew was the curator of Cressingham Church

so there was the connection with the church and the family.

And I just assume that one of those had taken this stained glass

window and, for some unknown reason, put it in the Manor House.

Whether it had got slightly damaged and they had to take it out

to repair it and he thought, "I quite like the look of that,"

and maybe he paid

to have a replacement put in that didn't match.

I have no idea.

I've no idea how it got there

but they've had to come across it somehow.

I can't imagine a vicar taking the window out of the church

just to pinch it.

But you never know.

The stained glass window is now safely boarded up and protected.

But what of its future?

It's part of the house, really, now.

It's something that happened a long, long time ago, whoever did it.

No, I think it should stay where it is, really.

It's now been 12 months since we last saw Old Manor

and Kieran's come to see what's happened to this,

our most troubled restoration from last year.

-Hi, Polly.

-Hi, Kieran.

-How are you?

-Lovely to see you. I'm fine.

-Nice to see you. Are you well?

-Yes, yes. Not bad.

Good. I'm glad to hear it. Well, I mean, last time I was here there was

a lot of scaffolding around and there still is.

I mean, why haven't you been able to move on more?

-Well, it's mostly financial. We basically ran out of money.

-Right.

The mortgage crisis hit us like a brick

and the mortgage lenders all changed their lending policies.

The key to this project was Polly being able to sell their

Liverpool house and use the proceeds to continue the restoration.

Unfortunately, with the recession, that hasn't happened and over

the last winter the storms and gales have taken their toll on Old Manor.

Inside, nothing has changed.

Wow. Well, I feel like we shouldn't be still walking through walls.

You know, that's not a good sign.

In fact, all worked stopped here 12 months ago.

I mean, it is still the scene of some devastation in here,

I have to say, but what keeps you motivated?

Because many people would give up at a stage like this.

Well, basically, I mean, she's my Miss Havisham, isn't she?

She's damaged and broken and but beautiful

and I've made it the state it's in at the moment

so it's my responsibility to put her back where she should be.

Many viewers sympathised

with Polly's great expectations for Old Manor.

We've had so many people come and visit, who saw the first programme.

I think we had 50-odd people turn up at the gate and every single

one of them has said, "If I win the lottery, Polly,

"I'll give you the money,"

so I'm just waiting for one of them to win the lottery, really.

-You're so positive, Polly.

-I'm sickening, I know.

Well, for me, it's just so difficult because it's such a beautiful room.

You can see the potential but it's a kind of tragedy that it

hasn't yet become the room you want it to be.

Well, I wouldn't say tragedy. Yes, it's just on hold, isn't it?

It's stasis.

I mean, there's not much I can do to make it happen any faster

so there's no point in being down-hearted about it.

I'll just get the money and it will get fixed.

So far, there have been no lottery winners.

But Old Manor has suffered another break-in.

The vandals smashed up more of the house including some of the windows.

Since then, Erich has moved into a caravan on site

and now lives there permanently.

-Hi, Erich.

-Hello, Kieran.

In his youth, he was in the French Foreign Legion.

They haven't had any trouble since.

-It is a beautiful place.

-And this is your home now.

This is the home and I've been here now a year. I have here all I need.

Life in the caravan is cramped but outside there is plenty of space.

And Erich keeps a collection of chickens, ducks and turkeys.

Do you think it's harder for you, in a way, having to see the house

every day and see the lack of progress?

No, it isn't because I know that, you know, we've been

together for 30 years, I know that if she has the dream and

she wants to complete her part of the deal, you know, it will be done.

My bit is an easy bit. I'm retired. I do whatever I want during the day.

I've got my animals.

I've got my Bijou and Polly is back home every weekend.

I've never been so happy in my life.

This project would have defeated many people,

but not Polly and Erich.

Despite all setbacks, they are still in love with Old Manor.

Look at that. Wow. This is amazing.

HE LAUGHS

Thank you. This is fabulous, isn't it?

That's my boat. That's my quay.

It's magnificent. I mean, when you get up into these timbers

you can just remember what's so special about this house, don't you?

Yeah, you do. I mean, you can see here the evolution of the building.

-And that means a lot to you.

-Oh, enormous amounts. Yes.

I mean, we're putting our bit, if you like, into the evolution

of the building and moving it on to the 21st century.

I mean, I've got to put in bathrooms and a kitchen

and stuff like that to make it so that you can actually live in it

rather than just have it as being some kind of a monument.

It's got to be a working home.

-Cos that's what it's been throughout the ages.

-Yeah.

I mean, three months to make it watertight, another

I don't know, six, something like that, to get it to some standard.

I mean, Erich, you must be dreaming about the start of that journey.

Well, I like to see the scaffolding gone, you know,

because I know that when the scaffold is gone,

the house is standing and is safe and secure.

I know it looks absolutely terrible and it is absolutely terrible.

I know. But it isn't as bad, in terms of work, as it looks.

Polly's vision is as strong as ever.

It's brought her a long way on this project

but will it be enough to see it through?

We'll get it done but it will take a bit longer than we had wanted.

And we may be in the caravan for a few more months yet.