For anyone taking on a renovation project, make sure you look under your floorboards before they get nailed back down. We did, and this is what we found…

• A corner of a sandwich (circa 2009)
• Empty bags of crisps
• Enough rubble to construct another house
• Wire casings and discarded electric and plumbing packaging
• A label from electrical wire bought in 1969 (lovely packaging, actually)
• And, our favourite…a pair of men’s underpants, and I assure you they were not from the 1930s

Because so many of our floorboards were not nailed down, we were easily able to find this treasure chest of glamourous goodies. I did not personally fish it out, though my husband did have the honor of removing the delicious looking sandwich lurking under out bathroom floors. No, I made the building company fish it all out before they nailed the boards down as part of the snagging list. The boss was mortified by what he saw as I gave him a sub-floor tour, room by room.

I was not upset the pants, more intigued, really. What exactly went on when we were not here…? A construction site by day, Chippendales club by night? Did we unknowingly have some naturalists working on site?

A little bit of rubble is acceptable, but a lot is not. And food is most definitely not! Underpants? Well, that’s a bit of a grey area. More a question for the pros: George, Sarah, Rich, what are your views…?

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This time it’s the Killearn Loch House Grand Design that’s up for grabs. From memory it’s got a lovely cantilevered staircase, and as the owner you have the ability to raise and lower the water level of the loch so that you’ll never be flooded.

Savills are listing it at £1.9million. I happen to know that this is my mum’s all-time favourite Grand Design, but she won’t be getting it for Christmas…

For more on the sale, check out the Primelocation Blog.

Like this Grand Design? Loathe it? Let us know by leaving your comments below…

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As far as I’m aware none of these houses have actually appeared in any films or TV shows, but they look like they could have. Click on the images to see the full listings, with lots more pictures. read more

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Seems the curved house in Clapham is up for grabs… FindaProperty have all the info over on their blog.

For the episode guide, click here.

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Our move down to Hove has come and gone in a flurry of activity and super-human packing sessions. The week before we were due to move in, there was a large list of things to be done by the building company – finish the floors, hang the radiators, finish painting, install bathroom and much, much more. Even with 2 days to go, it was still hard to picture how the house would look as there were up to 15 people in there rushing around trying to get things done. I decided that the only way to maintain my sanity was to have blind faith – at that point there was little else I could do, except get in the way.

We moved in on a rainy Sunday to a house that still needed a lot of work but had a working kitchen, working plumbing, working electrics and doors that closed. All of the necessities. We sat amongst our boxes in front of the large, curtainless windows and took it all in. The house was transformed in to the light and beachy feeling property we wanted, that was for sure. And even though the windows were splattered in (fresh) paint and covered in (old) mildew, we could still see the English Channel churning down the road.

Another far less charming thing we could see was that the original floorboards (that had been in good shape when we took up the carpets) had been mauled by a sander in inexperienced hands. The natural Treatex hard oil we had used gave a beautiful colour to the wood, but the boards were actually wavy in areas with huge gashes here and there. And they were very coarse and gritty to the touch. We had reviewed the floors after the first round of sanding, and told the manager they were very rough, and had been reassured they would receive a final sand and clean before the varnish went down. This had not happened. And about 30 of the boards had not been nailed back down so there was clonking and creaking with every 3rd step we took.

This floor botch job was a small disaster, because it meant we could not let our son crawl on it – the floor was just too scratchy.   He was not happy about being under house arrest (i.e. carried everywhere) for the two weeks it took to get a carpet down in his room, and a grizzly baby makes for a grizzly mom. So when Paul No. 1 came around the day after we moved in and I pointed out the floors, I expressed my shock that no one had bothered to a) check for the smoothness required before varnishing or b) clean them before varnishing. They had loads of dirt and hair stuck to the finish. I was trying to stay calm and cool, but that lasted about 2 minutes. He immediately offered to re-do them but I was not convinced that they would come out right a second time around unless he brought in a floor specialist company which he didn’t seem keen on. So we agreed to take the price off the bill. We are now weighing up whether to hire a floor restoration company (specialists only is my new rule) or lay sustainable and hard-wearing bamboo. We’ve retained almost all of the houses original features, so we’re not sure which way to go.

Now that we’re in the house, and the major work has been done, we can  take more time with decisions like the floors, the wardrobes, the wooden windows that need to be replaced, the garden, the exterior… and have more control over the work being done.

If you are considering restoring your floorboards, and want to avoid the headaches we had, read the 4Homes guide on Restoring Period Features. I wish our builders had.

And then there is what we found under the floorboards, but I’ll save that for next time.

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This week, our insatiable hunger for property porn led us to contemporary coastal homes. The collection below brings together some of the finest modern mansions the UK housing market has to offer, and they’re all perched atop cliffs, overlooking harbours or a stone’s throw from the beach.

Click on the photos to see the full listings, complete with lots more pics for you to drool over. All properties were found using the 4Homes Property Search. read more

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I decided to be organised about our paint selection, rather than make one of our typical last minute decisions, so I started collecting samples of paints a few weeks before the painter was due to start on the house.I narrowed the paint companies I wanted to use down to Little Greene, Farrow & Ball and Fired Earth because of their low VOCs (volatile organic compounds) which means the paint is less toxic, mild smelling and… can be licked by my tiny-and-eats-anything son.

The day Lynn (the painter) started, I arrived with my box full of sample paint pots and colour charts and explained the look we were trying to create – breezy, light, airy. We went through the various pots and she painted each one in a chunky patch on a wall she had prepped that morning. She wrote the name of each paint above the patch (in pencil) and we let them dry for about an hour so we could get a sense of the true colour of each one.

As anyone who has painted a room before knows, what a colour looks like on a colour chart and what it looks like on a wall can be two very different things, so I was very curious to see how the test would go.

When the paints dried it looked like a charming mural of whites, greens and greys. The colours I preferred jumped out at me right away and, luckily, my husband had the exact same preferences, so no battle there. We decided to go for Little Greene Linen Wash for the majority of the house and Little Green French Grey in the kitchen. I had not even heard of Little Greene until this project, and had discovered them in a mention they had in Grand Designs magazine where the paints were described as being environmental, chalky and very washable. They are pricy, but so are Farrow & Ball and Fired Earth. (Each sample alone for my short list of brands cost around £3.) And even though Lynn thought I should consider colour matching my Little Greene preference to Crown to save money, I was quite sold on the low VOC and ‘easy to wash’ combination.

Lynn was also worried it would be too watery, as some designer paints are. But after putting on the first coat she called to say it went on beautifully and that there was virtually no smell. And after a few days of painting with it, she let me know she loved it (’it goes on like butter’) and planned on using it in her own house. I have to wait until my trip down next week to see it for myself.

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Earlier today, regulatory body Ofcom cleared our 2007 programme, Best & Worst Places To Live In The UK, of any wrongdoing after the formula and statistics used to calculate the list resulted in Middlesbrough being named the worst of the UK’s 434 boroughs. read more

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Stories emerged this week that cash-rich Manchester City’s new signings are locked in a bidding war over Cristiano Ronaldo’s Cheshire mansion. Since only one of Toure, Adebayor, Tevez, Santa Cruz and my own former hero Gareth Barry will end up with the keys to ‘Gold Trafford,’ here’s some equally opulent properties in the area, fit for the Premier League’s new elite. They were all found using the 4Homes Property Search. read more

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