St Peter's Barn Restoration Home

Once we walked through that gate, we were hooked.

When I look at that house, I just think, "Wow!"

And every time I see it, I'm just, like, "Wow!"

It's a castle. It's a castle! How can you not buy a castle?

Wow! That's some fireplace!

It's going to be an amazing home.

-We'll stay here for the rest of its life.

-Are you happy?

We are way, way, way over budget.

I mean, I am actually living in a building site.

You have to make sacrifices.

There are days when you just think, have we made the right decision?

Are we doing the right thing?

I want it to look what it looked like when it was first built.

This is just such a beautiful place.

It's like every romantic part of my brain is just firing.

You don't have any idea of how much money this is going to cost you.

I don't think either of us envisaged

quite as big a project as we've actually taken on.

It's still a dream. It's a dream that we're actually doing it.

I can't wait to move in. It seemed just to take forever.

It's just a nightmare!

I'm telling myself not to worry.

I mean, because what can I do? I've got to finish the house.

This is St Peter's Barn,

located on the long-gone Stanninghall Agricultural Estate,

between Norwich and the Norfolk Broads.

In past centuries, it was a magnificent building,

commanding the surrounding countryside.

And boasting a cathedral-like interior.

It's 35 metres long and 20 metres high.

As agricultural practices changed in the 20th century,

the barn was ravaged to accommodate them,

its elegant design marred by ugly alterations.

St Peter's Barn is a crumbling shadow of its former self.

And so huge that few would dare to take it on.

But now there's hope it will be saved

because Nicola and Graham have decided

it's exactly the right project for them.

It was love at first sight, definitely.

The couple married in 2010

and each has a daughter from a previous marriage.

They'd been searching for a barn to convert into their new family home.

When we pulled up...

-We saw it initially from through the trees over there.

-Over there.

It just stood above everything else.

And that was it for me, I was done, sold.

Graham's been a builder and roofer ever since leaving school.

He's drawn to the building personally and professionally.

It's beautiful. The way it's been designed,

the way it's been put together.

It's such a feeling, it's fantastic, I love the place.

Absolutely love it.

And it's just the size of it.

The whole grandeur of this building.

And when it's done, it's going to be absolutely fantastic.

I can actually see what it's going to look like.

See it in my mind already.

In July 2011, the couple bought the barn for £325,000.

They decided to call it St Peter's Barn

after an ancient ruined church in the grounds.

For Graham, owning this barn is an ambition realised.

I've built for everybody else all my life.

Done it for everybody, but never for myself. So this one's for us.

This is going to be our home.

The family have sold their home and moved to a rented cottage

next to the barn while Graham converts it.

The barn was Grade II listed in 1984.

So Graham and Nicola will be working with the conservation authorities

to restore the exterior

and sympathetically convert the interior.

Sadly, a lot of damage was done well before it was listed.

A few things been done over the years by different people,

which has basically destroyed

what could've looked absolutely fantastic.

The slits in the windows, we're going to open them up,

bring the light in.

They've been done very, very poorly over the years.

Telltale signs of damp indicate parts of the roof are leaking.

The roof structure in that corner

may need a bit more attention than what we think.

Until we actually get up there and get the roof off,

we're not going to know.

Arches and doors have been knocked through, weakening the structure.

To me, those cracks looks like it's about to fall down.

It looks quite scary.

Nicola and Graham will have a huge task making the building sound.

And only then can they start on turning the enormous space

into a liveable family home.

To conserve the sense of scale,

the west wing will retain its full floor-to-rafters height.

Nicola and Graham intend to use it as a sitting room cum party room.

The ground floor of the central crossing

becomes an entrance hall and dining room.

And in the east wing, there's a kitchen breakfast room,

utility room, study and bedroom.

On the second floor are three more bedrooms,

a cinema room, and on the third floor is the master bedroom.

It's a colossal project,

with a budget of just £200,000 for the restoration,

funded from a self-build mortgage.

The only way to make it realistic

is for Graham to do virtually all the work himself.

If I wasn't building on it, you'd look at

nigh on a million pound to do.

It is a lot of work, but over 20-odd years of building,

you know what's got to be done and what order it has to be done.

So I'm not worried at all.

St Peter's Barn is a restoration on an extraordinary scale.

I want to find out how Nicola and Graham feel

about the challenges that lie ahead.

-Hello.

-Hi.

-Lovely to meet you.

-Nice to meet you, too.

-Lovely to meet you. Morning.

-Nice to meet you, too.

-Morning.

What an incredible building!

-Hm.

-Beautiful.

-It's vast!

-Do you really think you can make it a home?

-We'll try.

Can you already envisage what it's going to look like when you've done?

It's going to be beautiful. All the bricks need to be cleaned.

It needs all re-pointing. It'll make the building look completely different...

-Yeah.

-...once it's repaired.

Oh, it'll look absolutely amazing!

Ooo! This is a big, big barn, isn't it?

It's massive!

-Yeah.

-Is it a bit more than you expected to take on?

-Yes.

-Yeah. Probably by a double.

Is there any aspect of it that's freaking you out slightly, Graham?

Starting the roof.

-You're doing that yourself?

-Most of the work myself, yeah.

So you've taken on the hardest barn you could find.

Why would you do that?

Er...it is a challenge

and it deserves, it warrants to be put back and made to look good again.

The arches are extraordinary.

Yeah. It is the soul, isn't it?

-It's what the building's about.

-Yeah.

You sound like you've got an emotional connection with it.

I think I have. It becomes part of you, doesn't it?

Because you're opening it up, you're seeing what's been done.

It's beautiful.

Every day I come in, there's something different I find.

All the history and everything that comes with this barn, is what it's about.

And I think to make too big a change to it, to make it look...

would just destroy its soul, basically.

What's your game plan on this, by the way?

We're hoping, by Christmas,

to have enough built down that end for us to move into.

-About eight months' time.

-Eight months' time, yeah.

Blimey!

I can see the house. I can see it all finished. I can see it painted.

I can see absolutely everything every time I look at it.

Nicola and Graham's previous property

was a fairly typical modern home.

And even though Graham's a builder,

he's never attempted anything this size alone.

You could've gone from living on an estate to living in a house with a large garden.

But you've sort of done the most extreme leap you can do.

Is that a bit unnerving?

Both of us are the kind of people that just go for everything.

We don't do anything by half measures.

And I'm not really afraid to do it.

But there's a lot resting on Graham, isn't there, with this build?

Yeah, everything. And there's nothing I can do to help.

I can't go up on the roof. So it is difficult.

What I'd like to know is what you plan to do

with the inside of St Peter's Barn.

You'll come in through your entrance hall,

putting some lovely glass windows in.

Coming into your main grand hall, go up into the oak staircase.

And then into the sitting room

and we've got a big log-burning fireplace we're going to stick in.

Dining room at the back looking across the fields.

Got your kitchen and utility room.

-How many bedrooms?

-Six bedrooms.

-And your bedroom's on the top floor?

-Yep. Yep. We're up in the roof.

Bedroom four, which is actually going to become a cinema room.

I wonder what the old farmer would make of that?

His old barley barn with a great big cinema in it.

Is this kind of what your life's been leading to?

Yeah. Everything I've ever learned is going to go into this, and more.

It's then become more than just a home, hasn't it?

More than just bricks and mortar.

Since they bought the barn,

Nicola and Graham have spent months

wading through planning and preliminary tasks.

Now Graham's finally able to get to work.

Great. Just to get on and do something.

He's starting ten metres off the ground

with the most critical job in securing the barn's future -

replacing the entire roof.

It is all about the roof.

A lot of the damage is caused because the roof's not been looked after.

It's absolutely everything.

550 square metres of 1950s asbestos needs to come off by hand.

It's heavy, dirty work on a gigantic scale.

I think there's 300 sheets on here.

Removing the sheets enables him to see

the craftsmanship of past centuries.

Being a builder myself, to see the work that's been involved into this

is truly amazing, it really is.

When they built this, they built them downstairs,

so each piece would be numbered.

So like you'd have X and II joined to X and II.

Move along, you've got this beam becomes X and III.

Moves in with X and III.

I think it's just pure craftsmanship that's gone into it.

For Graham, the markings are a fascinating glimpse into the past.

He and Nicola are keen to know all about the history of their home.

So far, they've only gleaned fragments of hearsay.

It's not clear who made the barn so magnificent, or why.

We're going to do all we can to solve these mysteries

and discover the story behind St Peter's Barn.

Our historian, Doctor Kate Williams, combs the archives

to trace the people and events from its past,

while architectural expert, Kieran Long,

searches for clues in the building itself.

It's just an incredible, grand barn of the highest order.

I mean, this really is a barn of antiquity and status.

You see the old barn and you see the new barn

and people talk to us that we're making progress in our culture,

and to me, I see these two things next to each other

and this doesn't look like progress to me.

When you stand in this location, you realise what this building's all about.

It's perfectly symmetrical.

At the crossing is the main entrance.

A higher arch, slightly more modelled

with another course of bricks at the top.

It's really, really literate, architecturally.

This is a facade that's all about modelling in the depth of it.

They might look like blocked-up arches, but they're not.

This is an architectural exercise, if you like,

in seeing what you can do with a depth of a brick.

How beautiful can you make a brick wall?

And the bigger order, that we see up here of these four arches,

is dividing the facade geometrically.

It's giving an order to it.

And that is a clue to me that it's been designed.

It's already clear to Kieran this is no ordinary barn.

And the building materials in the gable wall confirm it.

This is a beautiful, sort of mottled polychrome facade of flint.

And you can see the effect is so decorative.

This is so common in Norfolk, this knapped flint,

on quite grand buildings. So it's a very high status material.

It's when Kieran goes inside the barn

he gets a true sense of just what an amazing building it is.

There's just an incredible atmosphere in here.

It's so tangible.

It's quite dark in here, it's quite cool. Dead silent.

It feels like being in a church. It's really extraordinary.

And because of the architecture, it just doubles that atmosphere.

It's all functional, too. It's all here for a purpose.

This bit I'm standing in here

would have had arched openings at each side,

and then these would have been the places for storage.

So in this central area would have been a place for work

and, you know, possibly a threshing floor, something like that.

Well, you can see how whichever farmer owned it very recently

has tried to make it into a more functional building

for modern farmyard machinery.

And, of course, this wide entrance here

is all about trying to get a tractor into here

or large trailers and so on.

Of course, this would never have been an entrance

and it ruins the kind of arcading that we see

so beautifully preserved in the other bays.

Kieran notices that despite the damage,

something very intriguing remains.

He thinks there might be a significant relationship

between the length and width of the barn.

So he tests his theory.

So I'm just pacing out the length of this wing.

So from this wall to that crossing is around 17 paces, I make it.

I'm just about to pace the width now

to see, kind of, if there is this relationship.

Three, four, five,

six, seven, eight.

About eight-and-a-half paces.

That means that it's exactly double as long as it is wide.

The even proportions are hugely significant,

echoing principles of Renaissance architecture.

It's somebody thinking about geometry.

They're not thinking about the practical business

of putting brick on brick and how big a sack of wheat is.

And it tells you that whoever built this

was somebody who was deeply in touch

with the latest thinking on architecture.

One of the things that we can tell about this building

is that it was related to a very elaborate estate.

How do we know that? Well, it's a really big barn

and that means you needed a big productive farming business

that could fill that barn and probably many others around it.

For me, you know, one of the first steps

will be to try and date it more clearly

so we can see just how advanced, in a way,

this architectural sophistication was.

Who was responsible for coming up with this ordered,

beautiful, symmetrical building for a mere barn?

Graham and Nicola are bringing the barn into the 21st century

with renewable energy, including solar panels.

They're on land close to the barn

so they don't affect the look of the roof.

Graham's also fitting as much insulation as he can to the roof.

We're going to lose heat through the walls

because there's no way of insulating the walls

because we're exposing the brickwork.

So the only way of trying to keep any sort of heat in there

is through the roof structure.

Nicola's a scuba-diving instructor who works in the warmer months.

She can't offer skilled help to Graham,

but determined to do her bit,

she's masterminding the budget

and preparing the grounds to be turned into a garden.

This whole site needs to be flattened and ploughed and planted.

I'm doing this because I can do it and I can't do the roof,

so I'm just pressing on with this.

As the heavy work continues on site,

our historical investigation needs its first big answer.

How old is St Peter's Barn?

Records are scarce, but archive and council references

suggest a date of about 1680, but it's not conclusive.

With no way of confirming the date of the building,

Kate begins her search at the Norfolk Record Office,

focusing on the 17th century.

She's quickly able to track down a deed of sale dating back to 1663.

It's for a farm at Stanninghall,

the former agricultural estate where St Peter's Barn stands.

And this is great.

It says it's being sold from a family called the Waldgrave family

to a gentleman called Sir Charles Harbord.

And this rather fabulous work of art of a document

is all about exactly what the buyer received.

What it doesn't mention is the barn.

Perhaps it's not even there at all.

Kate goes in search of further clues

and discovers Sir Charles Harbord bought more land in 1676.

He is buying Gunton Manor.

And most interestingly to me, he's buying that for his son John.

I suspect there's an elder son who's going to receive Stanninghall,

and so John is getting this estate,

which was a very common practice at the time.

The land purchased suggests to Kate

that Sir Charles Harbord must have been a wealthy man.

She heads for the Norfolk Heritage Centre

to see what she can find out about him.

Sir Charles Harbord turns out to be

one of the most influential men in 17th-century England.

He's important in Norfolk, but most of all,

he's very significant at the court of Charles II.

He's essentially a man with a hotline to the king.

This is because he's a surveyor general of the king's estates.

Charles II came to the throne in 1660.

As the king's surveyor general, Sir Charles Harbord's job

was raising revenue from royal estates

to fund armies, government and royal palaces.

But he played a wider role, too.

Well, here's an example of how he couldn't possibly be more important.

Charles II decides to marry Catherine of Braganza,

and our Charles Harbord goes over to Portugal

to escort the future queen and bring her back to England.

He's also massively significant

in the rebuilding of London after the Great Fire.

He's on the rebuilding committee for St Paul's

and he's so famous that when the celebrated diarist

Samuel Pepys meets him at a dinner, Samuel Pepys is star struck.

Clearly, Sir Charles was a man of great status.

And Kate suspects that had an impact

on his personal wealth and landholdings in Norfolk.

Charles Harbord was a very effective surveyor general,

but he was also pretty good at lining his own pocket.

He'd got land all over the country. He'd accrued huge estates.

And that's, of course, because as surveyor general,

he'll find out very early about the kind of land that's going cheap.

And that's exactly what I think we've got for Stanninghall.

He snapped up Stanninghall

because he heard it was going for a good deal.

And that's where St Peter's Barn is made.

So I've found the name Sir Charles Harbord,

but I wanted to know more about the family.

And this book gives me the name of his eldest son, Philip,

who is also described as, "of Stanninghall".

And this seems to me to be the answer.

Sir Charles Harbord and then his son, who inherits in 1679,

one of them is the wealthy landowner who builds St Peter's Barn.

Kate's found the names of the father and son

who owned Stanninghall around 1680,

exactly the time the barn is thought to have been built.

It could be the key to establishing why it's such an ambitious building.

Late spring 2012.

Atrocious weather wreaks havoc at St Peter's Barn.

I've never known anything like it.

The trees were bent, it was ridiculous.

The wind was horrific. The rain was torrential.

We had thunder, lightning, everything. Honest to God!

Absolutely everything hit us, just while we had that roof open.

You could actually feel the roof moving.

It must have been moving at least a foot either way,

which is quite terrifying when you're ten metres up.

The walls of St Peter's Barn

are designed to take the weight of the roof structure above,

but with the roof open, it started moving sideways.

That put outward pressure on the walls, with frightening results.

You can see how far it's pushed the brickwork out.

It's moved by about 50mm.

Somehow, the old barn survived the storms,

but while he inspected the damage,

Graham uncovered a much more worrying problem.

There's a critical weakness in the roof.

We've got big tie beams

that stretch from one side of the roof to the other.

They sit on the soleplate.

It's a big timber that all the roof sits on.

That one, where it's been rotting away over the years,

someone in their infinite wisdom's propped it up

with a little bit of six by two.

Now that's also rotted, so that whole timber

that probably weighs the best part of two or three tonnes,

and that's tying this whole section together,

basically, balancing on about four inches worth of timber.

That little bit of timber, if that came crashing down,

that would take the whole roof with it. It's one big structure.

You take away a part of that structure, the rest can't cope.

St Peter's Barn is much closer to collapsing

than anyone dared to think.

It is solely luck it didn't come down.

In fact, I don't know how it didn't come down. I really don't.

I was prepared to wake up the next morning and see it gone.

With the barn so vulnerable,

Graham has had to totally rethink this restoration.

Any additional weight on that roof

could be enough to bring it down,

so plans to start tiling have been scrapped.

There's two-and-a-half tonne per pallet

and we've got 20 pallets.

So you put that weight onto this roof,

again, it will just collapse.

It's meant completely throwing out the planned schedule of works.

Instead of tiling, he's decided the best way forward

is to create a load-bearing wall

that can support and stabilise the whole roof structure.

It's the knock-on effect. We've got the roof problems,

but that, in type, brings in the brickwork problems,

as well as the walls.

If I'd be honest, that is the stress part of it.

Trying to make everything run

and everything to run in situ with each other.

With the enormous roof looming above him,

Graham's struggling to visualise it ever being finished.

This section has become extremely hard.

More than I could possibly have imagined.

I nearly gave up at one stage.

So far, Kate's established that in the late 1600s,

Charles II's surveyor general owned the land where the barn stands.

But the deeds of sale from 1663

don't say whether the barn already existed then.

Finding an accurate date is critical to our investigation.

Kieran's research so far has suggested the late 1600s also,

but one source puts it into the 1700s.

Without conclusive evidence in the archives,

Kieran's enlisted the help of an expert

to try and date the building by its construction.

He's called in historic buildings officer, Stephen Haywood.

What is it that draws your eye in terms of trying to date the building?

Well, I will always look to the roof structure,

because that's where the clues are.

Now, this roof, we can see, has two sets of purlins.

The purlins being the horizontal timbers.

Yes, that's right.

And the way the purlin is jointed to the principle rafter,

-it's a good indication of date.

-Right.

So what they developed was to have a single mortise,

which was shared by the tenons of both purlins.

And they're tapered slightly, so one goes on top of the other.

-And you can see that the pegs are in diagonal positions.

-Yeah.

So from this mortise and tenon joint,

what kind of conclusions can you make about the date?

Well, I think it belongs to the second half of the 18th century.

That's when that detail is found on most of the buildings I've looked at.

The barn was built much later than we thought.

Stephen's expertise has given our first solid clue

to the history of this long-forgotten building.

That's so exciting for us,

because that's put this building a century later

than most of the history books have put it so far.

Yes, it does.

And you're willing to stake your professional reputation?

I'm perfectly happy with that.

St Peter's Barn is 100 years younger

than I thought it was when I first came here.

And for me, this is a major revelation.

Just by looking at this roof structure,

we've established that the building is of the late 18th century.

That rewrites the history books. And for me, that's fascinating

because it puts the building in a whole new context

in the development of Norfolk

and the development of this estate and of architecture in Britain.

It's a big step forward to have an accurate date for the barn.

Now Kieran and Kate can really focus on their mission

to discover who built the barn and why it's so grand.

The worst of the wet weather has passed

and Graham's passion for the project has returned.

Living on site has enabled him to indulge it.

This is very addictive. I don't want to leave here some nights.

One night, I think, I didn't realise,

it was about 12.00, I was still working.

I think Nic's become... I think she's single now!

The internal wall is now high enough

to support the roof beam that was resting on rotten wood.

Today, Graham hopes he can finally make the roof structurally sound.

Graham has called in his friend Brad to help

and he's going to need every ounce of it,

because today's task requires hair's breadth accuracy.

Lovely.

Done.

The jack lifts the beam just enough to get at the rotten timber below.

Plan for today is now we've picked the beam up,

cut away this old soleplate,

take that away and replace that with a new one.

So if we cut this out the way...

Much of the work is done from outside.

It's Graham's chance to show Nicola

the rot that so nearly caused disaster in the storm.

-You've not seen this yet, have you?

-No. Let's have a look.

-That whole thing was sitting on that, which is...

-Rotten.

-Yeah. And that little bit of timber under there.

-Oh, no! No wonder!

-Which was sitting on the wall, which was crumbling.

-Eurgh!

-OK, what happens now, then?

-The hard bit!

Suddenly, today is perhaps the most critical

in the recent history of the barn.

Its whole future rests on replacing the rotten beam with new hardwood.

Whoa!

Need to come round more of an angle, as well, don't we?

Graham and Brad are manoeuvring over half a tonne of timber

into a tight space, ten metres up a scaffold.

I think that deserves a coffee, don't you? Spot-on!

The biggest structural problem is under control at last.

-Lovely.

-Brilliant.

I'm well happy.

Getting to this stage has been a gargantuan task.

We had 200 plasterboards,

200 sheets of Celotex,

52 rolls of insulation and roofing felt,

80 bundles of baton,

about 10,000 screws and about 2,000 nails.

That's a lot of nails. A lot of poor screwdrivers have had it.

They've had enough.

By July, the build is running a month behind.

It's bad news because each extra month

means more rent spent on the cottage

and Graham not bringing in an income by building for other people.

But he refuses to be hidebound by financial details.

I was looking at what we'd put in the budget for this

and what we'd put in the budget for that, and I was, like,

"That's three times what we put in the budget."

And in the end, he just said,

"I don't want to know about the spreadsheet any more.

"Delete the spreadsheet, I'm not interested."

Over the following weeks, there's significant progress

as Graham begins to lay the 9,000 pantiles.

They're modern tiles, but the same style

as the original creator would have chosen.

I love sitting up here.

Got the farmers working in the fields,

horses in the fields over there.

This has probably been like this since this barn was built.

When they were building this,

they were seeing what we're looking at here.

Obviously, this is going to outsee us.

Hundreds of years of being pulled about and it's still standing.

And I want it to look what it looked like when it was first built.

It's absolutely fantastic.

Having thought the barn dated from the late 1600s,

Kate discovered that the land St Peter's Barn sits on

was owned by Sir Charles Harbord.

With the revelation that it was built in the 1700s,

Kate has expanded her search

into his descendants in the following century.

Even from the mid 18th century, records can be pretty sparse,

so I'm so lucky to have found this,

which is a book all about the pedigree

of the families of Stanninghall.

There's a lot of information, names, dates.

And the way to make sense of it and try and find out

who was there in the 1750s is to draw a family tree.

So our family tree starts with Sir Charles Harbord,

the surveyor general to the king.

And he has quite a lot of children.

First of all, we'll look at his sons.

We've got Philip, William, Sir Charles

and his fourth one is John.

By 1692, Sir Charles's three eldest sons have died

without any sons themselves.

And so the entire Stanninghall Estate

goes to John, the youngest son.

John now owns both the Gunton and Stanninghall estates.

But when he dies, he has no direct male heir,

so the estates pass to his nephew.

When the nephew dies, they pass to his nephew, Sir William Morden.

He changes his name to Sir William Harbord

as a condition of inheriting.

He could be the man we're looking for.

Because this young man inherits the entire estate in 1742.

And this is the time that our barn is being built.

It's an impressive inheritance of land.

And it seems Sir William Harbord

has plans to build a grand hall at his Gunton Estate, too.

And this is particularly interesting.

It says, "Sir William Harbord, who inherited the estate in 1742,

"commissioned Matthew Brettingham to build the hall."

So this is a name of an architect in 1742 who is there on the estate.

This is a real breakthrough.

Kate's found out that Brettingham,

a distinguished architect of the day,

was working on the estate where St Peter's Barn stands

at around the time it was built.

Next, she and Kieran will need to work out

whether he might have had some influence

on the building of the barn.

By November, the barn is totally watertight

and a lot of other remedial work is complete.

Today, there's a big crew on site,

preparing to pour 166 tonnes of concrete for the floor.

Once the floor goes in,

we have really reached a turning point in the build now.

Shouldn't be coming across any problems any more.

Fingers crossed.

-Right, ready?

-Yeah, right, let's go.

Up to the red line.

Right, that's well deep where you are, so wait there.

We have floors at last! Finally in!

Next week, we'll actually have rooms.

Usually, I'm working on my own,

but when you've got a bunch of guys, it changes the site in every way.

You're having a laugh, talking to people.

Wahey!

It's brilliant! THEY LAUGH

When you look through the hallway and through to the lounge,

it looks really awesome.

That is massive!

NICOLA LAUGHS

Hey, you're dirty! Get off!

Nicola and Graham are thrilled to have tangible progress,

but I'm keen to know how they've coped

tackling such an enormous project with almost no help.

It's time to pay them a visit.

Hello, Nic. I feel like I haven't seen you for absolutely ages!

-I know!

-It's great to see you. Where's the husband? Where's Graham?

He is working very hard in the barn putting steels up.

Most nights, he doesn't get in before 10.00 at night.

-Are you serious?

-Yeah, completely.

-Where is he?

-He's in here.

Hello, Graham.

-Hiya.

-How are you?

Yeah, I'm good. Let me come down.

I haven't seen you for such a long time!

-And you've been so busy, haven't you?

-Yeah.

It's looking fantastic!

It's starting to look like a house now.

Graham, you've done... I mean, since I last saw you,

I can't believe you're still standing!

Is there ever a day when you think, "I don't want to get out of bed"?

The roof. We went through a stage on that

because every day, it just hammered down with rain.

-Has it held up your schedule, do you think?

-The roof has.

I reckon I'm the best part of, probably, six months behind.

We will claw it back with the internal works.

As long as we get the inside done, we move in, the outside can wait.

This is the fabulous kitchen.

Yes. We've going to have the AGA in the corner,

-units come all the way round to this side here.

-Very good.

A fridge, and then we're going to have a big central island,

big kitchen window going there

and then an arched window in the hallway above.

Lovely light space, as well, isn't it, for you?

When I first met you, you were struggling to visualise it.

Is it coming together for you now?

Yeah, definitely. Especially the kitchen.

When I came into the kitchen, when he built the walls,

I was, like, you can see the kitchen now,

and I can visualise the children's bedrooms, as well.

It's bigger than a church hall!

Oh, your lovely big fireplace!

Beautiful! Beautiful, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-Really lovely!

But suddenly, this space, sort of, has come alive, hasn't it?

It's going to be a fantastic party room.

We're going to get big chunky sofas, but push them back, and what a great party!

You won't need to push any sofas back to party!

Leave the sofas where they are!

The effort that's gone into this project so far

is truly extraordinary.

Graham's carried 9,000 tiles by hand up to the roof,

12 at a time.

-I'm really proud of it now.

-You're pleased with it?

-Yeah.

It's lovely. You could easily believe it's been there

-for years and years, couldn't you?

-Yeah.

By doing the roof himself, Graham saved over £50,000, but at a cost.

I went through a stage where the rains would come in,

the winds would come in, everything was hitting us.

-I think it was something like 70mph winds, we had.

-Oh, God, Graham.

I didn't want to go up there. I'd had enough.

-It must have been awful.

-It was horrible. It really was.

It got to the stage where, at one point, I wanted to sell the place.

That's how bad we got.

I didn't want to get out of bed in the mornings. It was horrible.

I'm guessing Nicola's played a crucial role.

-But just mentally having her there.

-Mentally. Yeah, exactly.

We have a laugh, we talk, you know, we sing. Anything.

It's probably made Nic and I even stronger

because we're working together and we're just having a great laugh.

Before I go, I just want to find out

how hard this roofing lark really is.

-Are you all right with four?

-Yeah, four's OK.

Bung another one on.

It's starting to get really heavy.

Oh, all right, put another one on.

Is that 12? Up you go.

It just looks like you're getting shorter.

THEY LAUGH

-Do you want me to take them from you?

-Don't make me laugh!

With the roof finally watertight,

the next critical phase will be putting in the windows.

Creating them is one of the very few parts of this restoration

that Graham cannot do himself.

Craftsman Nick Hunt has the tricky task

of ensuring these new additions

match the beauty of the original barn.

What makes these windows so complex is,

not only because it's curved,

but because of the size of the curve,

the window has to be built up in sections.

We've got another bit to be cut in the middle here

and that can go together, glued, cleaned up.

And then after that, the mouldings will be put on to finish it off.

It's important to get the aesthetics correct

so that everything looks like it was meant to be there.

It will look really, really nice when it's finished.

Kate's established Sir William Harbord,

the owner of the estate where St Peter's Barn stands,

hired architect Matthew Brettingham to build Gunton Hall in 1742,

around the same period the barn was built.

Sadly, Gunton Hall no longer exists,

but Kieran's come to the Royal Institute of British Architects

at the Victoria and Albert Museum

to discover more about Brettingham.

Matthew Brettingham's most famous engagement, really, is Holkham Hall.

It was designed by the architect William Kent.

Brettingham took on a job in 1734

as clerk of works, looking after the constructions.

We've found this wonderful book,

which is Brettingham's drawings of Holkham Hall.

Each one signed by M Brettingham, architect.

Now, this book was, in a way, very controversial,

because through it, some said

that he was trying to claim the design of Holkham Hall,

which, of course, wasn't his.

Misleading or not,

these drawings show Brettingham's deep understanding

of proportion in the classical style.

His work on Holkham gained him future commissions.

The most complete of which being Langley Hall,

just a stone's throw from our barn.

Built in 1740, it may have been the showpiece

that led Sir William Harbord to commission Brettingham

to design Gunton Hall just two years later.

Kieran wants to take a closer look at its architecture.

What you can see from a facade like this

is that it's very carefully ordered, in terms of proportion.

It's all about, you know, giving order and civilisation

in a landscape of romantic beauty.

Wow! This is where you get the full effect of this elegance and symmetry.

It's beautiful.

Kieran was expecting to find similarities between Langley

and what little we know of Gunton Hall.

But what really strikes him is much more unexpected.

This amazing, kind of, paired pilaster composition here,

is just so evocative to me, of St Peter's Barn.

You know, that entrance of the barn

has that, kind of rough, almost rustic classicism.

Here, it's done with much more fineness,

but, you know, it's almost the same thing.

At the top here, how the brick is just carved

and moulded into being almost like a classical column.

It's really striking similarity.

St Peter's Barn is almost like a crumbly, farmy version of this.

And when you see the comparison here

between this brick classicism at Langley

and the pilasters at the barn,

you know, it is tempting to say,

could it have been Brettingham who designed the barn?

With Kieran's leads all exhausted,

it's unlikely we will ever be able to be sure

if Brettingham was involved with the barn,

but finally, Graham seems to have turned a corner

in attempting to save it.

Oh, it's gorgeous! I love the sun!

He's working on the central archway

that will become the barn's main entrance.

The poor quality flint work here

is a later addition, and he can't wait to remove it.

That's what I've always wanted,

to return everything back to what it should be.

And this flint work shouldn't be here.

Once this comes back out, it's back to the way it was built.

There'd have been a big set of doors

and you can imagine a horse and cart going through it.

The arch is more defined and the pillars either side.

It's starting to bring back some of its charm

that's been taken away from it, isn't it?

At Norfolk Record Office,

Kate's working on the final piece of the puzzle.

The reason why St Peter's Barn is so grand and elaborate.

Landowner Sir William Harbord

would have been a wealthy man,

but the barn wasn't just about him displaying his own wealth.

We know that Matthew Brettingham

was involved with Sir William Harbord at Gunton Manor,

but if he was the one designing St Peter's Barn,

it's not just about beauty and showing off.

In the 1750s, gentlemen estate owners were trying to make money

by attracting the best type of tenant farmer.

And they make the most money out of the land,

and that way to get them was by creating the best type of farm

with big, grand buildings.

And that's exactly what St Peter's Barn is.

Sir William Harbord would have received rent

from many tenant farmers on his estate.

And Kate's able to trace one of them.

Well, this is really fascinating.

This is a lease between Sir William Harbord of Gunton

and his tenant farmer, William Gouge.

A gentleman tenant farmer, of course, who can sign his own name,

pretty significant at the time.

This man is out there farming on the Stanninghall Estate

and making lots of money for Sir William Harbord.

William Gouge is typical of the tenant farmers

who would have been attracted by the grandeur of St Peter's Barn,

and whose knowledge of new farming methods

helped make the Stanninghall Estate even more productive.

So even though, perhaps at the time

St Peter's Barn seemed rather excessive, rather extravagant,

it was worth its weight in gold.

Stanninghall became this incredibly successful estate,

so wealthy, so rich.

And an awful lot of that was due to our St Peter's Barn.

At the barn,

the schedule has now slipped behind by eight months.

The steel structure and three floors are in place,

so Graham's able to work on the internal partitions.

This side's the bedroom.

And we come in through the doorway into the dressing room.

But it's a relief just to have got to this stage.

Sub-zero temperatures in March

slowed down vital repairs to the brickwork arches,

where the new windows are due to go in.

And the bitter cold affected Graham, too.

When it's minus two in here, working on your own,

it's not a nice place to be.

Your fingers are frozen, your toes are frozen, everything.

I've aged by 50 years.

Despite everything, the building is progressing.

As it does, Nicola's more able to help out.

Anything that isn't heavy, then he teaches me to do.

So I've been strapping the bricks together,

bolting all the wood up in the loft.

Everything I do is one less thing that he has to do.

And we're both over here and we're both together.

By the end of April, the couple have reached a crucial phase,

fitting the windows into the classical arches

that will transform the barn.

Once the windows are in, you can imagine moving in there.

The rebuilt brickwork arches

have been temporarily supported with a wood structure.

Today, the first one will be removed

and replaced by the window frame.

This is probably my first ever arch I've built.

And there's a lot of bricks and a lot of weight in there.

Worst case scenario, it could fall down. Just stand back.

Excited, actually, to see the window go in.

Yay!

The arch stays solid without the supporting structure.

It's a great start.

It's come out, probably a bit better than I thought it would.

The next hurdle is slotting in the frame

which was made off-site into Graham's arch.

-All we've got to hope for now is it fits.

-It fits!

It's another one of those milestones, isn't it?

We've been through the wind, we've been through the rain,

the hail, the snow.

The weather hasn't beaten us.

It's obviously slowed us a lot, but it hasn't beaten us.

I've been waiting for, like, 18 months to get the windows in.

So, yeah, it's fantastic.

It does feel like we're on the home straight now, definitely.

That does look really good. It's so exciting!

It looks good. I'm pleased with that.

I've returned to St Peter's Barn for the last time

to find out how they're getting on.

But before I do, we're going to tell Graham and Nicola

everything we've found out about this extraordinary building.

We bought in an expert. He looked at these joints and he said,

that's a joint that's undoubtedly from the late 18th century,

a hundred years later than all of the literature says about your barn.

-It's much younger than we thought.

-To me, the date was irrelevant

because the beauty of the barn, that was more interesting.

Brettingham, one of the major architects of the late 18th century.

Most importantly, Langley House.

We did start to feel like

there are some very strong resonances in your barn.

Yeah, you can see that. They're just so similar.

Tantalisingly, we have no definite proof,

but maybe even Brettingham had a hand in St Peter's Barn.

During the time of our man Sir William Harbord,

the way in which he turned land to profit

was by encouraging the best tenant farmers.

So you gave them the best possible farm properties.

To know it's an architectural building,

-that alone just adds that little bit more, yes.

-What we wanted to hear.

Just knowing exactly what that barn was about, why it was built

and, you know, it's just the icing on the cake.

Over the past century, the once-mighty St Peter's Barn

had been reduced to nothing more than a crumbling, empty shell.

Carved up by the needs of modern farming practices,

the true quality of this barn was long forgotten.

Graham has battled with the elements and the building

every waking hour, seven days a week for 16 months.

They had hoped to move in by Christmas 2012,

but that date came and went and they revised their plans.

Hello!

It's now July 2013,

and I've come back to get the latest on this gruelling restoration.

Nice to see you. Hello, darling. How are you?

Lovely to see you! It's looking fantastic!

It's got windows and doors, which is absolutely awesome!

The weather was very, very unkind to you.

-We'd have been in there by now.

-It was tough, wasn't it?

I mean, it was a very difficult...

But it's made the journey, hasn't it?

I think it makes you appreciate it more, as well.

Because of what you've gone through,

now to what's happening, it's evolving.

You're not living here yet, it's not finished.

But there must be stuff you want to show me inside.

-There is.

-Yeah! Come on.

Tormented by bad luck and endless delays,

Graham and Nicola have given all they have.

And it's paid off.

At the heart of their new home is a bright and spacious kitchen diner.

This is an awesome kitchen!

This incredible space heralds the dawn of a new era

in this barn's history.

Not as a farm building, but as a home.

The last time I saw this room, it was a dirt floor, it was wet,

it was incredibly dark, actually.

How do you feel looking around it now?

You can't imagine it's the same place.

-It's a lovely light in here, isn't it?

-It's beautiful.

And given that the house isn't finished,

can I assume that the quality throughout the rest of the build

is going to be up to the standard of this room?

-Yes.

-Oh, definitely. I won't allow it not to be.

Throughout the build, their greatest challenge

was dividing up this cavernous barn

into a series of liveable rooms.

And they've done it.

Makeshift doorways have gone.

Rooms are now lit by carefully positioned bespoke windows

which no longer mask the unique character of the building.

This is a lovely room!

This is beautiful!

Oh, I couldn't be happier.

And to rebuild just this column and this arch

took us just over a thousand bricks.

Graham, it's an extraordinary piece of work that you've done here.

Yeah. Again, like you say, you look at it

and it drives you that bit more. You want to do that next bit.

You want to see that next bit. You want to move on and progress.

How soon is it going to be before this looks like a proper bedroom?

-By the end of next week, this'll be a bedroom finished.

-Yeah.

And just below the colossal roof

that he worked so tirelessly to restore

is the master bedroom.

This is an incredible space.

It's absolutely beautiful.

There's just something about this roof area.

I love this roof area.

When this is done, it's going to be what I'm most proud of.

Graham, all of this stuff has been carried up here by you.

At any point, did you think this is too much for one man?

No. I just do it. There's no...

I don't think about it any more.

You know it's got to be done, so you just do it.

If it hadn't been a one-man job, would you be living here now?

Definitely. We'd have been in months and months and months ago.

But it's given me more passion for the building.

If a team of guys had been in here, it'd have just been another build.

Downstairs, the 35-metre-long barn has been partitioned...

..to create the most incredible double-height sitting room.

It's magnificent, isn't it?

-Yeah.

-It's absolutely magnificent!

The fact that you didn't move in yesterday,

how does Graham feel about that?

I think he's really disappointed

because everything's been about today.

We wanted to be in, I wanted more of the garden done,

but just for one person to physically do everything he's done,

I mean, he's working from 7 o'clock in the morning

till 10 or 11 o'clock at night. He can't do any more than that.

16 months of dogged determination

and Graham is well on his way to creating six bedrooms,

four bathrooms and a breathtaking sitting room.

You're not finished, but I'm feeling very positive

that over the next few months,

this house will just come together and flourish.

-Do you feel that way?

-Definitely.

Two weeks ago, this room was just breeze block walls, and now look.

And then we're going to work our way round doing that to each room.

And then bring the family in, and then its purpose...

That's the reason you've done it, is it, Graham?

It's the only reason, really, other than the love of the building.

That is it, it's for them.

You know, I'd be happy in me caravan, out in the thing.

But there's that difference for family,

it's a completely different feeling to doing it every day

for somebody that you don't know.

What is the extra ingredient, do you think,

-that you put in when you're doing it for family?

-My heart.

This house, I've broken bones doing this,

-I've drilled bones doing this.

-He has!

Yeah, everything. Everything's been put into this.

Because you...

Because I adore the building... and I love my family.

THEY LAUGH

9,000 screws.

20,000 nails.

Seven miles of underfloor heating.

That is just part of what Graham has had to put into St Peter's Barn

to get it to the stage it's at now in this mammoth restoration.

It took Graham and Nicola

to recognise what a special building this is.

It had been ignored for generations and its future was bleak.

But our research linked St Peter's Barn

to a series of extraordinary characters

in a story that may have been lost forever.

Today, thanks to one man, it's been saved.

On the next Restoration Home -

an extraordinary house encrusted with ecclesiastical decoration.

It's just a bit insane, this house.

And an intriguing pedigree.

That name immediately sets bells ringing.

Now a new owner battles years of neglect.

I hadn't quite realised that the tower is about to collapse.

And pays a high price.

What on earth was I thinking?

Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd