Old Manor Restoration Home

Historic houses both humble and grand have all played their part in the story of our nation,

but today many are at risk and some in danger of being lost for ever.

I'm going to be following the fortunes of six properties,

all facing their own struggle for survival.

-Oh, look, you can see the rout.

-Yeah.

-Wow!

It's like walking into a Tudor fantasy.

This is not quite what I was expecting.

And they all have new owners, committed to turning them into their dream home.

It's a bit like a little, old lady waiting for a facelift

and we're coming in to make her better.

I never, ever, thought I'd do a project like this in my life.

I have spent years restoring derelict, old properties,

and having poured everything in trying to create my perfect family home.

I know what a challenge it is to rescue a precious old building.

There's a lot riding on it and it's scary times.

We love it, we want to finish it, but sometimes it just feels like too much.

It's Restoration Home.

I love it here in Norfolk.

I love the wide, open land and the vast skies.

Historically, it's a difficult place to make your mark.

There's very little decent building stone here,

so craftspeople have had to resort to using flint, or mud.

So any house that has withstood these elements for hundreds of years

is going to be in a pretty frail state.

Renovating a house in this landscape is going to cost,

and not just financially.

This is the Old Manor in the central Norfolk village of Saham Toney,

a Grade 2 listed house that dates back centuries,

but has accumulated an extraordinary mixture of architectural styles along the way.

It's a house that's full of history,

but the question is, can it be unlocked before it's too late?

Old Manor is on her last legs, beset with damp,

woodworm and Death Watch beetle.

You'd think this was the last restoration project anyone would consider taking on,

but the Old Manor has found an eager would-be saviour.

This hotchpotch of an historic building has been bought

by solicitor Polly Grieff and her husband, Erichh.

That beam up there, look, it's got some kind of mould on it.

It does need changing.

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

This one is a friendly house.

It's a bit like a little, old lady waiting for a facelift

and we're coming in to make her better.

-An expensive facelift.

-Yeah.

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

A lot of the building looks like it needs far more serious surgery.

-This is rotten.

-Is it crumbling?

The world thinks I'm completely mad, but sometimes you've got to go with your heart.

If you're going to take on a challenge, you might as well take on a big one!

That was made the day you were born.

Oh, thank you so much.

Souvenir!

As you're older than I...

The connection Polly instantly feels with the Old Manor

somehow overrides any of her doubts.

It's this staircase that made me fall in love with this house.

It's so solid, it's proper English oak.

You couldn't shape this banister.

Even though the rest of it might be crumbling around my ears,

this is still here and it's not going anywhere!

Polly paid £400,000 to buy Old Manor,

but at the moment she and Erichh live 200 miles away in Liverpool.

She's been married to her French husband for 29 years.

He retired from a very demanding career in forensic psychology,

dealing with paedophiles, rapists and murderers.

He spends his time in his garden

and brings me roses, which is more than I can ask of anyone, really.

Say, please, please, please, please.

You good girl. You good girl.

Polly's work as a solicitor is based in London,

though she spends most of her time travelling or working from home.

With three grown-up sons who've fled the nest,

she's decided it's now time she and Erichh moved to the country.

They've chosen Norfolk because that's where Polly's side of the family originally comes from.

She will be managing this restoration,

but they both see the Old Manor, and the two acres of land that came with it,

as a legacy for their children and grandchildren.

For us, it's very deep inside.

We need to be passing on something, but not just money.

It's about the idea of dynasty.

It's about the idea of family buying a piece of land, buying a house,

and staying in that house and moving that house on down the generations.

The other attraction of Norfolk is that Polly and Erichh's grandchildren are also living here.

-What's that?

-A stone.

It's a stone, isn't it? It's a funny one.

I'm a hands-on grandma, like I was a hands-on mum.

So...it's important.

Polly's 25-year-old son Max, and his young family, live a short distance from the Old Manor.

It means Max, who's a builder, can help out with the restoration.

I think it's a very beautiful house.

It needs a lot of work and that's why I'm on the job, ready to do it.

My parents have looked after me and brought me up very well,

so it's about time I paid them back a bit, you know.

Polly dreams of the day when she can move her huge family dining table from Merseyside to Norfolk.

When I was looking for a house to buy, it had to be a house that could accommodate this table.

This table will be going into the panelled room,

the Jacobean panelled room in the Manor.

The oak panelling in the Old Manor's ground floor dining room

has managed to survive for 400 years, but it's seriously at risk.

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

On the other side of the room it's got Death Watch 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.

Throughout the house, there might be other costly surprises lying in wait.

Polly's son Max fears the extensive 20th century repairs

to the Old Manor's pebble-dashed walls could be hiding 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.

They've yet to discover how big a problem they have on their hands.

All the beams, you can see in here, it looks like a honeycomb.

It's all very easy to break.

That's why we've got to take the whole lot off,

all of this off and check each beam.

Polly has hired a firm of architectural consultants

to draw up the restoration plans and manage the build.

She's received listed building consent from the local planning authority for what she wants to do.

The most radical part of the restoration involves adding

a three-storey extension at one end of the building.

It will give the Old Manor a modern kitchen and dining area.

The three existing ground floor rooms will be restored

as a formal dining room, living room and study.

Upstairs will be three bedrooms

and a new stand-alone bathroom on the first floor,

with a fourth bedroom and ensuite bathroom at attic level.

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

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

to get it to be the splendid house it's going to be in the end.

Erichh is on a modest pension and Polly is the main breadwinner now.

She will be relying mainly on her income as a company solicitor

to fund and drive this restoration forward.

But it won't be enough to see the whole restoration through.

If we can sell the house in Liverpool, then that's fine, we've got enough to cover it.

It's juggling the financial balls, keeping them all in the air while getting this project finished,

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

If they can sell the Liverpool house, Polly thinks the restoration of the Old Manor

could be finished in around 18 months.

It's obviously going to be an enormous amount of work,

which half terrifies and half thrills me.

I can't imagine a better feeling than seeing something like this

come together and almost raising this house from the ashes.

I can't see there's going to be much more excitement in a restoration project than that.

If Polly manages to save this building, it won't just be a triumph for her and her family,

because buried in the Old Manor's crumbling DNA

are century after century of precious British history.

But it's a history that's going to take some serious detective work to unravel.

Starting with the Domesday Book, Doctor Kate Williams

will try and find the earliest historical references

to the house and land that Polly and Erichh have bought.

And architectural expert Kieran Long begins his investigation

by trying to make sense of the extraordinary mixture of styles on display in one building.

Wow! It doesn't look that special in some ways.

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

There are already some things that are really interesting about it,

these fantastic chimney stacks, they're really spectacular.

The other funny thing, there are all sorts of little baubles all around it.

They've been used to pretty it up, these funny minaret towers,

and even this bay window here with its strange balustrade.

On the western side of the house, there are clues as to how old it might be.

We've got this typical suburban pebble dashing,

and then in front of us here, something that's unmistakably ancient fabric.

This 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.

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's on the other side of the house, where the modern concrete render has fallen away

and exposed original timbers, that Kieran finds the clearest evidence yet

the Old Manor started life as a medieval building.

Perhaps at first glance you might expect this to be a brick house that's been pebble-dashed.

But, no, much older style of construction

with a timber frame and this adobe wall, which you can see falling to pieces, this mud wall.

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 a typical construction of that era,

for this part of the world.

Inside the house, there's more evidence of very old construction methods in the partition walls.

You have these branches, birch tree, perhaps, maybe an oak tree.

They're just thin branches, laid vertically.

They would have been bound together somehow as a kind of base

on which to put the render and the plaster.

The quality of this wood and the condition of this wood is extremely impressive,

and it's because it's been treated the way it should be treated,

it has lime plaster over the top, it's allowed to breathe,

so it's not rotting away like the timbers we saw outside.

It's difficult to tell how long a house with walls of timber and mud

might have stood on this site, but Kieran has already discovered

there's far more to the Old Manor than hotchpotch and pebbledash.

It's an amazing survival, in a way.

No doubt there's been a farmhouse here of some kind for a very long time.

There are traces of that original building that we can still see today.

Kate Williams wants to find out if the Old Manor is mentioned

in one of our oldest historical documents of all.

The Domesday Book has been described as England's greatest treasure.

It was William the Conqueror's guide to all the taxable land

in his kingdom in the year 1086.

I'm looking at the facsimile of the Doomsday Book

here in the National Archives.

It's really a most incredible document.

It's almost like the whole of the 11th century is at my fingertips

and about to come to life.

I'm looking here at the Norfolk section of the Doomsday Book.

This is essentially the index.

Here we have all the lords of the manor in the area, the real bigwigs.

Kate finds a reference to 60 acres of land in Saham,

where the Old Manor is located.

There's no mention of a house, but at the time of the Domesday Book

a "manor" meant far more than just a building.

A manor is a huge and important thing in the 11th century.

A man is in charge of this, he's got serfs, he's got knights.

I mean, he has his own personal army.

It turns out the man who owned Polly's land 20 years after the Norman Conquest

was Roger Bigot, a powerful ally of King William

and one of the first Earls of Norfolk.

It was Roger Bigot and his family who built the impressive

12th century Framlingham Castle, just 40 miles from the Old Manor.

Polly's house might not be mentioned in the Domesday Book,

but there's no doubt its timber frame has been supporting the building for centuries.

What Kieran finds upstairs

confirms the scale of the restoration Polly has on her hands.

The revealing thing up here

is just what a terrible state this structure is in.

Look at the size of this timber and how much load this must be carrying.

It's just sheared-through, almost.

Scattered throughout the house are important clues

to its history.

This doorway is really quite finely made.

There's even coats of arms here, and so on.

In the entrance hall are pieces of stained glass

that once belonged in a medieval religious building.

To me, this is an incredible survival of something really precious and beautiful.

It's summer, 2011.

Nine months after Polly and Erich bought the house.

The planning is over and at last, the restoration of Old Manor is underway.

To inspect the roof timbers which make up the Old Manor's skeletal frame,

Polly and the builders have agreed that all the roof tiles need to be removed.

It means erecting scaffolding over the whole house -

which will also allow the concrete render on the walls to be taken off,

so damp in the Old Manor's supporting timbers

can be properly assessed.

With Polly's dream family home shrouded in weatherproofing,

I'm paying my first visit

to find out how she feels about what lies ahead.

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's no actual restoration possible yet.

Polly's still at the stage of investigating what might be wrong with the place she's bought.

This is a massive undertaking for you.

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 200-300 houses.

CAROLINE GASPS

When I came down, I visited every house that could possibly

fit my dining table.

I just saw it and I wanted it.

I saw it and I fell in love with it, and I thought, "This is the house that I want to make home."

In the site Portakabin, Polly shows me

her plans for the new extension to her Grade II-listed house.

It's going at the north end of the building,

where she was allowed to demolish the 19th century outhouse

and positively encouraged by the local conservation officer

to build something modern.

We talked a lot about evolution of the building.

He told me quite categorically that if I wanted to put an extension on the end,

I would have to replace it with something 21st century,

not with a facsimile of what was there.

So I thought, "If I'm going to do this,

"I don't want to build something ordinary.

I want something extraordinary.

I want something in keeping with the house.

One of the things I love about this house so much

are those pointed eves,

and the feeling of height,

and the great, long chimneys.

I wanted something which kept the same sort of skyward emphasis.

Absolutely, and you've done that.

This here...

-It's glass.

-This is glass, and this is your kitchen.

-Yes.

And this up here is...?

That side will be my dressing room,

and that side is my new bathroom on the first floor.

A few months ago, Polly thought the total cost of the restoration

might come to between £200,000 and £300,000.

As the builders start to assess the extent of the work that might be needed,

she's had to think again.

Did you pay £400,000 for the house?

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

What's your budget, Polly?

I shan't be cutting my throat if I have to pay the purchase price over again.

But at the moment, it will 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 you are looking at it in those terms,

because I think it will take a lot of money,

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

It's fragile.

Three weeks later, the roof of the Old Manor has been stripped bare.

The concrete render on the walls is being prised off

to get a closer look at the timbers

that have been suffocating behind it.

It's not good news.

The builders are finding more damage by deathwatch beetle,

an insect, native to Britain,

that thrives on the fungal decay caused by damp.

Its name comes from the ominous tapping sound

the adult insects make in the rafters of old churches.

But it's the deathwatch beetle's larvae that bore through timber

in the most devastating way.

That's what deathwatch beetle does.

Basically turns wood into honeycomb. Just falls apart in your hands.

It will just chew through all the wood.

They're the ones that done the most damage.

Then there's termites and whatever else we can find in there.

Some of these timbers might survive with repair and treatment,

but many will need replacing.

This is all the dust and larvae and stuff.

At the top, this bit of wood looks all right,

but then you get down here,

and it's just pretty poor.

As the builders try to get to grips with one alarming problem,

they uncover another.

It turns out the concrete render that caused so much damage by sealing in damp,

has actually been helping the building to stay standing.

We think the render is pretty much holding the walls together.

By taking this render off,

effectively we're weakening the walls.

With the walls now stripped back to their centuries-old timber and mud,

the builders are taking no chances.

They're fitting temporary bracing to the Old Manor's exposed original structure.

At the moment, we're having to take the slow approach,

because the house is unstable. Well, we believe it's unstable.

at this present moment in time.

Old Manor is now at its most vulnerable.

Stripped of its roof and walls,

it's now just the skeleton of the old Tudor house

it started its life as.

Inside though, there are puzzles to the building's history

that Kieran wants to solve.

The beautiful stained glass windows

seem out of character in this old house.

So how did they get there?

Norwich is just 30 miles from Saham Toney.

In medieval times, this was the second-biggest city in the country,

and was home to over 50 churches.

It became a centre of excellence for stained glass-making.

St Peter Mancroft church has some of its finest.

Here, Kieran has tracked down expert David King.

One of the main reasons 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 stained glass,

but had no idea where it might have come from.

The first thing that shouts out from this picture to me -

that it's made in Norwich.

Right - what tells you it's made in Norwich so immediately?

That is actually the style.

There is one motif, which is...

..these little trefoils along the hem, there.

Right. OK, OK.

The two bishops depicted at the top, there.

They really have a lot of similarities.

They do, yes. If you look at the mitre,

it's got these little circles round the edge,

The same with the crosier.

-Yes.

-And the poses are not dissimilar.

It could indeed be the same person.

I think you have to go to the church

where I think it comes from.

That will give us some historical background.

So you think you know the precise location where this was taken?

I think I do, yes.

This is an amazing breakthrough.

David believes he knows where the glass was originally from.

I have a black-and-white photograph here

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 input inside out.

So somebody just found it attractive,

wanted to knock together a bit of a surround for it,

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

-Quite.

When this was the other way round, this was a matching figure to this one,

and they were stood facing each other,

the two bishops.

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

originally comes from?

If it is - it's a remarkable piece of historical detective work.

It's so extraordinary, really, to stand here

and be in front of the window

that David King pointed us to.

There are the six openings that 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.

We know that because, just as David described to us,

it mirrors precisely the form of the bishop

on the opposing, fourth opening.

So that light - the distinctive shape of the panel containing the head -

is not mirrored here, but is in Old Manor's.

So we know that's exactly the spot it was originally placed.

It's most likely that the glass

was removed from the church after the Reformation

and then later sold on.

It was happening to churches all over the country,

and meant that stained glass and other artefacts ended up on the open market.

Kieran has come down to Strawberry Hill in south-west London.

In the 18th century, it was the home of the historian,

art enthusiast and collector, Sir Horace Walpole.

One of the things about Strawberry Hill that's so extraordinary

is all of the stained glass that Walpole collected,

from a wide variety of sources,

to piece together in these windows, and the windows he designed and created.

So, like Old Manor, it has this feeling

of stuff drawn from many different sources, according to taste,

to give the house a sense of the ancient, a sense of heritage,

a sense of origins, if you like.

It was Walpole who, in bringing all this stained glass together,

started a craze, a mania for buying old stained glass,

and just applying it in domestic buildings.

So, at the Old Manor, there's something of the same sensibility,

though without the kind of artistic control.

There's this idea that if you bring together pieces of old stuff,

and collage it and arrange it in the right kind of way,

you can bring some instant heritage -

some kind of ersatz history - to your own family.

I think that's what's going on at the Old Manor.

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

With all the concrete pebble dash removed, site manager Nick

has realised that the whole building is going to need underpinning.

The house was constructed onto a compressed sand

and flint base.

It's 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 it originally would have done.

If we're going to put an extension onto the side of the house,

we need the two to move together,

if at all, really.

What we can't afford to have is the original moving...

..and the new stood still.

Underpinning the house involves

digging out over a metre of earth from under the walls,

then inserting a concrete footing

and a layer of bricks to deepen the foundations.

Nick is overseeing a very careful, methodical operation.

Because we've got such an unstable wall,

we have to attack it bit by bit.

If we took the whole section of the wall out, the whole house could drop.

So we're doing it in metre-square sections.

That measurement we've agreed with our engineer.

We dig a hole. We then miss one and move on to dig the next one.

It just gives us that support on the house, whilst we're digging.

Once we've cast the concrete in the first hole,

we can then dig the second hole,

and it's a process we repeat right round the house.

It's the last thing that Polly wanted to hear.

The underpinning work means delays and more bills.

With the Liverpool house still unsold,

money is beginning to be a problem.

It's cost around 30,000 altogether,

so it was very expensive - not just in terms of actual work,

but all the ancillary costs.

The Portakabins and the skips,

and all the things you have to hire,

are still on site for many more months than they needed to be.

With a house of this age,

there is always likely to be things which come up,

and there is a certain amount of contingency

in the budget.

But it's been a bit of a blow.

As the builders wrestle with the very foundations of the house,

historian Kate Williams wants to try and find out

who actually lived in the Old Manor all those centuries ago.

She's come to the County Record Office in Norwich

to consult a unique set of antiquarian volumes

about Norfolk's past.

What I really want to look at is this - the Francis Blomefield's History of Norfolk,

that he wrote in the 1740s and 1750s,

and was finally published in the early 19th century.

It's an invaluable insight into Norfolk throughout the ages.

He goes right back to the medieval times.

Kate discovers the land in Saham Toney originally

owned by Roger Bigot in the Domesday Book

is known by a specific name from some point in the Middle Ages.

This is a completely new name here - Page's Manor,

which wasn't in the Domesday Book.

I think it's interesting,

because Old Manor stands on Page's Lane,

so it seems very much Page's Manor is the same place

as the Old Manor.

Looking at later documents,

Kate learns that by the 17th century,

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

Whoever owned the house in this period

added the oak-panelled Jacobean dining room.

And it's here that the builders have found yet another problem.

This wall is on the verge of collapse.

The base of a timber-framed building is supported

by crucial horizontal beams called the sole plate.

But the centuries-old beams in this corner of the house

have rotted away.

The original sole plate to the house

sat at such a level that the ground level

was actually in line with the sole plate.

So any moisture from the ground was being drawn in by the timbers.

The timbers above it were drawing in the moisture as well,

and therefore the bottom halves of the timbers

had all perished.

To make matters worse,

this is the end of the building where the new extension will go.

It's an emergency that requires a new oak sole plate

to save the Jacobean room and stabilise the house.

The sole plate is quite a substantial-sized piece of timber.

Basically, that will now take the weight of the frame.

That is your rock, really.

Weighing around a half a ton,

the new oak beam is carefully manoeuvred into place.

New mortise joints have been cut,

so the sole plate should slot into the original timbers above.

One false move by site manager Nick, operating the telehandler,

could be disastrous.

Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!

Eventually, the new timber is coaxed into place,

and, for now at least, everyone can breathe a sigh of relief.

We'll underpin all this,

remove all this old brickwork, concrete under it,

then it'll be bricked up, right underneath the wood, tight.

This wood now takes the weight of everything above it.

Once we've got the foundation, like Kev said,

there should be no room for it to move.

We'll have a solid wall, and that will tie in nicely with the extension

we put on the side of the house.

With the underpinning underway and the new sole plate in place,

the restoration is finally moving forward.

Old Manor is still a fragile building

but she's no longer on the critical list.

It's always alarming to see your house

stripped back to the bare bones,

with nothing to protect it from the elements,

apart from a flimsy piece of plastic, just flapping in the breeze.

The Old Manor is particularly vulnerable at the moment,

with Polly's costs escalating,

and disaster waiting around every corner.

But no-one could love this house

as much as Polly does.

She has fallen under the spell of its magnificent chimney stacks

and its beautiful wooden panelling.

You don't start something and then just walk away,

and throw your hands in the air cos it gets difficult.

People have said to me, "Why don't you just bulldoze it,

"or let it fall down by itself?"

But that's not what I'm about. That's not what this project is about.

The project is about getting this house

back into a liveable state for me and for my family.

Practically the only structures unaffected by the work so far

are the chimneys,

and architectural expert Kieran wants to know why

Old Manor has such an impressive set.

He's come to Framlingham Castle in Suffolk

where he hopes to find some answers.

When Roger Bigot's family built this castle in the 12th century,

it was a revolutionary building.

This is the place where the idea of chimneys began in England.

These were flues that were part of a transformation

in British architecture,

in domestic architecture, which goes from having a fire

in the middle of the room and a hole in the roof,

to having a fireplace in the wall and a flue taking the fumes

up and away and out through a chimney stack.

Of course there are Tudor chimney stacks also on top of these more ancient medieval flues,

so this is also a place where the chimney stack becomes incredibly important

as a decorative piece - as an expression

of wealth and power and cultivation.

The Tudor chimneys at Framlingham Castle were added in the 1500s.

The main chimney stack at the Old Manor is believed to have been added

less than 100 years later.

When you look at the brickwork, there are real similarities with Old Manor's.

These kind of thin bricks from the Tudor period.

You can tell by their proportions they're not the bricks of today.

This is a kind of older style.

In the County Records Office in Norwich, Kate has had a breakthrough.

In a 400-year-old document, she's uncovered the name of the owner

who could have commissioned the grander features of the Old Manor,

then known as Page's Place.

Looking under Page's Place here in the Record Office,

I found a will that relates directly to it.

It's a will from 1612, by one Edward Goffe, of Thraxton.

This is the first time I've actually found a reference to someone

who lived at our house, Page's Place, and going right back to 1612.

The will suggests the owner of Page's Place was a wealthy

and generous figure, supporting almshouses and the local poor.

Edward Goffe was a really important philanthropist.

Page's Place gives an annuity

of over £5 a year.

That will be used to maintain a free school he set up in Saham Toney.

What it's essentially doing is making sure the community survives without him.

Edward Goffe died right in the middle of the Jacobean era,

the early 1600s.

That date is a near-perfect match for the date

of the Old Manor's oak-panelled dining room,

which was built around a fireplace

with a central flue topped by those

spectacular Tudor-style chimney stacks.

It's very likely that the house we see today,

or at least the core of it built round the chimney,

was built by Edward Goffe in the late 16th/early 17th century.

This is the man who built the house we have today.

400 years later, Polly's workforce is still in the process

of rescuing the Jacobean panelled room from collapse.

New timber sole plates have now been fitted at the base of three supporting walls,

and the foundations are being completed using traditional materials.

We're just bricking up underneath this beam to support it.

There'll be a new brick-and-flint-work

skin around the outside,

that will match in with the existing.

We use lime mortar,

and we have to use the old-fashioned red bricks,

reclaimed,

and the flint work is all reclaimed, as well.

You're just using a heap of rubble, virtually,

and you end up with something that's going to be there for a long while.

The Old Manor has now been covered in scaffolding for four months,

and until all the underpinning is finished,

the real work of restoration cannot begin.

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

is 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 like a chimney with a whole load of sticks round it.

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

You have to do the underpinning, the treatment of the wood,

but it does seem to be

that it's costing a fortune and I have nothing there to show for it

but a skeleton house.

To make matters worse, the one thing that would have eased Polly's financial worries

simply hasn't happened.

I had planned originally, when taking on the project, to finance it by the sale of the house in Liverpool.

Unfortunately, due to the "credit crunch" and general downturn,

it hasn't sold.

So I'm having to find the money

for the rest of the project out of my own finances, which is quite hard going sometimes.

My whole future is invested in the Norfolk house.

It's frustrating it's going so incredibly slowly,

and costing so very much.

You get a vision, start working, then it starts hitting you in the pocket,

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

Two months later,

the Old Manor is still waiting for a way out of its troubles.

The house in Liverpool remains unsold.

With Erich retired, the main financial strain is falling on Polly.

She's paying two mortgages, which are enormous.

But...

she would never show it.

-Even to you?

-Not even to me.

We do have arguments.

You can't marry a Frenchman and not have an argument,

but...

we always find out the solution to everything.

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

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

No, we have to finish it,

and it will be finished. It looks bad, but it's not that bad.

It's not that bad - I've seen worse.

I've seen worse.

Have you, Erich?

-Yes.

-Cos I've seen a lot of houses,

and that one looks pretty frail to me.

Erich and Polly visit the Old Manor whenever they can, staying in the caravan they have on site.

Erich didn't like the house at first, but he always supported Polly in her dream.

To say the truth, I hated the house. When I saw the house,

it was like a ruin.

You couldn't do anything. You wouldn't be able to live in it.

You wouldn't even put your dog in it.

It's only for the last three or four months,

since they removed all the rendering and all the plastering

that I fell in love with the house, because of the beams.

I love this house because of the wood.

Come and sit down. Come, come!

Where I see frailty in the old beams,

Erich now sees something different.

Without the walls, without a 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.

Seeing those perfect beams - a straight beam coming down,

which has moved and bends a bit with the time.

An enormous beam on the side,

which has been eaten by whatever.

It's the deathwatch beetle.

-Deathwatch.

-Yeah, yeah.

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.

SHE LAUGHS

'Despite all that's happened, it seems nothing can dent

'Polly's dream of the Old Manor becoming her perfect family home.'

Has there ever been a moment when you thought,

"I really wish I hadn't taken this on"?

-Not yet.

-Really, Polly? Never a moment?

Never a moment of thinking, "Why did I start? This is just huge!"

When I have to find the money for stuff, I think,

"I could spend this money on something else,"

but I've got a vision of what it's going to be,

and you have to go through the lows, as well as the highs.

I have more idea of exactly what I'll do

decoration-wise, and where I'm going to put stuff.

SHE LAUGHS

Oh, I love you. You're talking about decoration...

I'm standing here in a pile of sticks, talking about decoration.

-As you hang onto the Acrow prop, tell me where the sofa's going to go!

-Over there.

SHE LAUGHS

Bless your heart!

In the course of this restoration Polly has faced problem after problem.

So it's difficult to believe that Old Manor could possibly have another setback in store.

Least of all, what was to happen just a few weeks after my visit.

Polly's son Max discovers the house has been broken into and trashed.

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.

The ceiling of the 400-year-old Jacobean-panelled room,

only recently saved from collapse - has been ripped open.

A whole wall supporting part of the solid oak staircase that Polly loves has been kicked in.

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 that, 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.

The vandals nearly escaped with one precious piece

of the Old Manor's fabric - the finely-carved door frame

with a coat of arms, which used to be in the entrance hall.

There was, in here,

a beautiful archway, carved out years ago.

They've pulled the whole frame and the post out of the wall

and attempted to steal it,

but fortunately our neighbour has a light, and he's flashed a light and scared them off.

It is a bit of a shock

to think people would do something like this,

maliciously, really.

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 are investigating,

but for the moment at least, the restoration of Old Manor has been put on hold.

With her Liverpool house still unsold, Polly has run out of money,

and all building work has stopped.

Our historical investigation, though, can continue.

The damaged archway has been locked away,

but it does have an intriguing carving on its top corner -

a coat of arms.

Kate wants to know if this will provide another clue

to Old Manor's history.

She's tracked down Ron Fiske, a local heraldry expert.

This to you, Ron, looks like a coat of arms of the Tudor period.

We're going right back to the 16th century here with this family.

You can tell that a little from the shape of the shield

and the fact that there's a bit of curling over

at the top.

Where it's divided in two,

it actually represents marriage.

And this left-hand side would be the gentleman,

and the right-hand side is his wife.

The man's coat of arms

is an unusual coat.

-There are not too many people who have this wavy band.

-Mm.

It looks like a snake, doesn't it?

That is a family called Goldingham.

Oh!

I can show you that in here.

You've got the same...

Oh, yes, exactly the same.

..wavy band here.

We know that he died in 1516.

That confirms that it is a Tudor coat of arms, as does the shape of the shield.

The Goldinghams had their seat at Belstead Hall in Suffolk,

which is over 50 miles away from Saham Toney.

So how did the Tudor archway, with its coat of arms,

find its way to the Old Manor?

I think it must have been imported into the house.

The must have bought it.

Belstead has been much altered.

We know from other records that a visitor to Belstead Hall

found a lot of loose carvings and mouldings.

Interesting.

So it's quite possible that somebody doing a house in Norfolk

would look for artefacts to put in his house.

So it could have been in the 18th/19th century -

-we don't know when they purchased it?

-That's right.

So the vandalised 500-year-old Tudor archway

and the stained glass were brought in to Old Manor as part

of an 18th or 19th century makeover,

a fashionable pretension of the period -

to use architectural salvage to give the house some history.

It's now two months on and I'm on my way to Old Manor for my final visit,

to find out what the latest is with this troubled restoration.

First though, Kate and Kieran are bringing Polly and Erich

up-to-date with all they've discovered

about their building's past.

You are doing it up - you're doing a big change,

a big DIY job, but throughout history, others have done it up -

they've added extra chimneys, bits of glass...

It's not its first facelift.

It's had a lot of facelifts, and that's why I love it.

-I'd say this is a building that's never been finished.

-No, and probably never will be.

Kate has unearthed one of the earliest documents that relate

to the Old Manor - the will of Edward Goffe in 1612.

This Edward Goffe was an important philanthropist,

and what's marvellous is he

founded the school in Saham Toney.

I don't know whether you knew that.

-I didn't.

-No, no.

-So you knew the school quite well?

-Of course.

On the house nearby, there's a plaque.

Just on the other side of the road.

I've seen the plaque, but never read it.

So he's the owner of Page's Place, and he also installed the school.

-So you didn't know that at all?

-Had no idea.

But the thing I love most about your house...

Are my windows.

It's so beautiful. It's one of the gems of it.

I assumed it was stolen at some point from a church.

We assumed the same thing. You're right, this is stolen property.

There were several studios working in Norwich at the time.

Probably the most prominent

was a man called John Wighton.

This is almost certainly the work of the Wighton workshop,

which dates it between 1420 and 1425.

Which is an ancient piece of glass,

and also one of the finest pieces of glass

possible to find in Norfolk.

It's utterly extraordinary.

I'm very happy to know that,

even though it's perhaps stolen property, or...

-Borrowed.

-..borrowed property,

it's been saved,

even if it's in a secular setting. It is safe.

-Erich, you weren't fond of the house, initially.

-I hated it.

You hated it!

Does finding out about and exploring this history make you think of it in a different way?

I've really fallen in love with it,

but having on top of that some history,

I feel so proud.

I don't feel so little any more.

I feel I'm brave and can be proud of what we're doing.

Still wrapped in scaffolding nine months after it went up,

this fascinating old house is far from complete.

'So on my final visit to Old Manor, I've come to find out how Polly

'and Erich are coping.'

Looking at it,

erm,

nothing's changed, really, has it?

Not a lot.

You could have built

a new house for the amount of money

and time you've put into this.

You probably would have spent less and certainly be in by now,

wouldn't you?

That's not what we set out to do.

We set out to renovate an old building,

and to do our bit for the evolution of it.

It's better not to hurry it.

We're only in our 50s.

We have another 50 years to live.

I don't think I have another 50 years for the revisit, Erich,

so could you trot on?

Erich is as determined as Polly to see this massive project completed.

As I see the damage done from the break-in for the first time,

it's not surprising to see why

they were both deeply affected by it.

They've done quite a lot of damage here!

How does it make you feel, Erich?

When I saw that, I didn't want to come back in the house for quite a while.

-You're furious about it?

-I'm very angry,

because it's not...

it's like attacking the roots...

of a family. It's an old house.

It's got some history and it should be respected.

'Polly's beloved panelled room wasn't spared, either.'

I'm so sorry, Polly.

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

Life is like that.

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

-This is all new, isn't it?

-Yes.

That's the thousands and thousands of pounds' worth of underpinning.

THEY LAUGH

-It doesn't look much, does it?

-But it is holding the room up.

It's one small victory in a catalogue

of half-victories.

It's all good.

I come in here when I want to recharge my batteries.

I put my hands on the wall and commune with my house.

Come over and try.

-What d'you say to it?

-Not a lot.

It's mostly internal. I just tell it from my head that everything's OK.

We're getting there. It's all right, don't worry.

Don't panic!

How do you remain

so upbeat

when everything around you is literally collapsing?

There is no point in getting downhearted.

I understand that.

There is no point,

but I've been there myself, and though you know there's no point,

you still do get downhearted.

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

I suppose it may well be genetic.

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

Polly's optimism is not misplaced.

They still haven't sold the Liverpool house,

but she has managed to secure new funds with the building society.

It will allow them to start building again.

They have already spent £100,000 on this restoration,

and think they will need to spend another 250,000 to finish it.

Here we are.

A scene of devastation.

-But the builders are starting work again?

-Yes.

-When's that?

It should be 26th/28th of the month, of April.

-That would have been a five-month break?

-Yeah.

Starting again in April.

Whole job will be finished by...? Give me a date.

We have a bit of a dispute over this.

I'm optimistic and say it will be done by Christmas 2012.

And Erich says...

I'm optimistic thinking it will be summer 2013.

Will it have been worth every penny?

Every single round one.

It will be absolutely worth it.

Polly didn't have to take on this building.

Let's face it,

for a lot less heartache and money,

she could have built a whole new one.

So, why didn't she?

She wanted to create a family home

that was rich in history

and character.

With each new addition to the Old Manor house,

whether it be the fabulous chimney stacks,

or the stained glass windows,

this place has become richer, more interesting.

But I think, even more significant than that,

is Polly's input.

The way she has just ploughed on regardless,

whatever has been thrown at her.

Polly often refers to this building

as "a frail old lady."

Well, I don't know

when this place will be finished,

but there's one lady

that really impresses me.

It's Polly.

Next time on Restoration Home...

A forgotten timber-framed house is taken on

by brave new owners.

This one here appears to be just sitting on a cobweb.

But as the skilled craftsmen struggle to save it,

suddenly the whole restoration is in jeopardy.

-How much of your budget is gone?

-All of it.

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