Yew Tree Cottage - Lighthorne The subject of Channel 4 - George Clarke’s “Old House New Home” series in 2021 David and Lynn Thorn. We bought the cottage at auction in June 1973, about three days before our first son was born. In retrospect not such a good idea! We paid £9700 for it, over our upper limit of £9500. We had a mortgage from Southam Council and an Improvement Grant from them to help with the renovation work, one of the conditions of the mortgage.. I was not earning anything like enough to renovate the cottage properly so corners were cut and I did a lot of the work myself. At the time we thought it was a very reasonable job! The property at that time was not listed so unfortunately anything was possible, a lot insisted upon by the building inspector. The cottage was a two up and two down property with one inside cold tap in the kitchen and an outside toilet. No bathroom. In a very poor state having being lived in most of her life by Mrs Humphries who had recently died. On advice from Southam Council we employed one of their favoured builders to do some of the work. He in turn subcontracted others to do the work for him. This was an absolute disaster, the contractors seemed not to have any building experience whatsoever. My DIY skills were far better! The terms of the improvement grant were such that we were told to make many alterations that in retrospect were totally wrong but applicable with the building regulations at the time. The ground floor had beautiful local stone floor in the kitchen (now the dining room I believe) and a suspended floor in the main sitting room. They made us rip up the floors and replace with concrete slabs over a damp membrane of polythene. Not only inside but outside as well. There was a cobbled path around the cottage which matched the path up to the front door, this had to go in favour of concrete. The floors and paths were dug down 6-10 inches so that the cottage at one stage just sat on earth “walls”. The kitchen floor stones were of uneven thickness and “not suitable” for relaying, they told us. The floor was dry with no signs of dampness. I subsequently laid them outside the back of the cottage after digging out the garden to make a delightful patio area with a dry stone wall. We were able to get stone locally from a quarry on the way to Moreton Morrell, probably where the stone to build the village had come. The Sitting Room. The floor joists above the living room are the originals and were in very good condition needing only to be cleaned up, I scraped them to preserve the saw marks etc. The suspended floor had to be ripped out and a concrete floor laid. Very rudimentary under slab insulation was laid, broken up polystyrene! Insulation under the concrete slabs was quite a new idea and no polystyrene sheets were available then. Some of the walls had been lined with asbestos because of the damp problem. Damp was not a problem it was just lime plaster which had become hygroscopic and retained moisture. The so called experts said that the walls were suffering from rising damp! We stripped all the plaster off the walls which were dry. They were repointed with totally the wrong thing, cement! But that is what the building inspector insisted. They also wanted us to insert a chemical damp proof course, another daft idea in walls 2ft thick infilled with rubble stone. The chemical ran right through without doing its job, still it ticked their box. Under floor electric heating wires were laid in the concrete slab. The final screed by the amateur builders did not set! We compromised and let them add another screed on top of that which is why the floor level in this area is higher. We had quarry tiles laid but result was unbelievable, there was a very distinct hump in the middle of the floor, the tiles were not in straight lines or even square with one another. There are a couple of photos of this floor but not really clear enough to see the poor work. With all the other unbelievable bits of workmanship enough was enough and we sacked the builder. I ripped up the quarry tiles and stacked them outside for the builder to take away. This he did as well as taking a lot of other things including the tongue and grooved panelled walls from the bathroom and adjoining bedroom! The amazing fireplace, totally not in keeping with the cottage had a small fire place built inside it so that came out. I laid an under floor flue from outside with a flap valve to the centre of the fireplace to assist with ventilation for the fire. Made a steel hood to overcome smoking problems. The enormous chimney has iron pegs or steps hammered in to it presumably to allow someone to climb up it and clean the soot! Or hide! The fireplace may have come from a large manor house which burned down around the time the cottage was built in 1632. Not sure where this information came from and have not found any mention of a fire in this modern day with internet searches. We had lovely fires in that fireplace with none of the guards I saw in the film. We burned large elm logs which would go through the night smouldering. There was so much felled elm around following the decease. They never burned with much of a flame but gave off a lot of heat. Kitchen Room There was a sink in the window recess on the back wall with a very unusual ancient sink beneath a Belfast type sink and one cold water tap. This was all taken out and a twin round stainless steel sink top installed. The builders did this and I could not believe my eyes when they had finished it, The basins were set in to a formica topped piece of plywood. The formica had been stuck with bitumen or something similar which did not work! The formica curled up and the plywood sagged in the middle. The photo of this is not clear but the curled formica can be see. This I ripped out lafter and did it myself. The floor joists above this room were in a very poor state with perhaps only two still in the outside walls having rotted away, only the floor boards kept the lot together and there were two layers of floorboards above which were also in poor condition. Dutch elm disease was rife at that time and a local sawmill provided new joists (fence posts!) at a very reasonable price. There was so much elm stacked up. I also got the sawmill to saw up floor board planks 12 inches and 14 inches wide to match those in the large bedroom above the sitting room. We dried these outside for a year or more, sanded them and laid them on top of an interim chipboard floor ( we had to wait for the boards to dry) The fireplace had a bricked up doorway on the left side on the inglenook. Outside this was the outside toilet. I opened up the doorway and fitted a door taken from elsewhere in the cottage. The outside loo was taken out and eventually this little room housed the oil fired boiler. Bathroom and small bedroom above the kitchen were made out of one room with a stud wall lined with t&g boards as mentioned before! There was a window above the basin which when you took over the cottage was a cupboard. Hallway Stairs and Landing The original stairs’s foot was just inside the front door. Under the stairs was a shallow trough used, we were told, for the salting of pig meat. There was a dividing wall between the hallway and the sitting room with a small door under the stairs in to the room, the door was used later for the bath room I think. We took the lathe and plaster wall down to open up the room to the hallway. There was not much of a support for the sitting room centre beam at the hall end, just a 4 x 4” upright so we took a more substantial post from the shed to replace it, the shed did not fall down! The shed was a well built half timbered one with over lapping board cladding. It also included a wash house with a wood or coal fired cast iron wash tub. It was situated beside the house where the garage etc extension is now. This extension was not built by us. As with the kitchen room the joists were in a bad state and had to be replaced. The original stairs did not meet the building inspectors approval so had to come out. I made a staircase with open treads but this did not get his approval, too steep. So on their suggestion I made a second flight of stairs, turned around with a landing step at the bottom with exits on both sides, this achieved the 42 degree angle they wanted. I did put up a banister on the left side going up which I see on the film was not there, just a shadow of it was visible on the post at the top. The joists and stair well was remade by a local carpenter to a much better standard than I could have done. (He took me to see a large farmhouse he was building which he had used the local stone and wood from the farm. Very impressive with enormous elm beams etc done in the traditional way and stone work in similar Cotswold white lias. Large Bedroom above the sitting room. A wonderful room with exposed wooden roof poles holding the thatch as well as rope ties and one window to the front. The building inspector again! He insisted on having another window put in to achieve, I think, a window area of 10% of the floor area. I argued that the usable floor area that you can stand up on was quite alright for the front window size but he disagreed. We had to put another window in. I contacted a local thatcher to ask about this, how do we do it. His answer was to take a saw to the thatch and cut out the size we wanted! This we did, my super carpenter took it on and made up the 6 x 2ft window with matching roof pole beams above. We were very surprised at the thickness of the various layers of thatch, see the photos. The thatcher, an old man, was heard to say “That’s the biggest spider I have ever seen” coming out of the thatch. He thatched around the window and re ridged the top. I got him to lay a garden sprinkler hose along the top of the ridge so we could water it on 5th November! In those days the village had a bonfire in the play area above the top of our garden, with no thought to the fire hazard it posed to us. There were only two thatched cottage in the village at that time. There was a little bit of woodworm in the floor boards but a light sanding improved them. Heating As mentioned before we had under floor electric heating but this was not very effective so a few storage heaters were brought in. These in turn were not very good so I installed oil fired heating with radiators. All pipe work had to be surface mounted there not being any under floor space, similarly wiring was mostly surface mounted. The boiler being sited in the old outside/inside toilet room off the kitchen fireplace. Gas was not available up Post Office Lane then. Garden Back and Front Outside the back door I dug back in to the garden to make a patio area in to which I set the floor stones from the kitchen. I built dry stone walls and steps up to the garden. There was a two hole privy up there next to a pig shelter. One of the photos shows part of the garden path up to the front door. This we discovered under inches of earth and grass. The paths around the cottage were the same but on instructions from the building inspector they had to go and be replaced with concrete, we were not happy! A drive way for car parking was dug on the right side of the garden up to a shed which is no longer there, replaced not by us with an extension. There was a sinister yew tree in the front garden and I got home one day to discover it had been cut down by my wife’s brother, a tree surgeon. I was not pleased! We moved in to the cottage in 1974 but only for two years before moving to Cornwall. Very sad to leave the place after so much work. Sold to an older lady whose relatives lived at the end of Post Office Lane. Contact me if you want any other information. David Thorn 1 Hartland Terrace Bude Cornwall EX23 8JY 01288 353905 Hall and stair area Original top of the stairs Old original staircase viewed from front door Small bedroom and bathroom. Two layers of floorboards all very poor condition Old stairs Bathroom Sitting Room - old cupboard next to the fireplace removed New hallway/stairs joists Door to large bedroom and new beams in the kitchen room Kitchen old sink and inglenook fireplace, all original when we got the cottage. The bricked up doorway in the inglenook to the left. I took out the modern brick fireplace but left the one behind which is still there today. One of the sitting room fireplace with its “modern” addition which I removed. The badly laid quarry tiles. Below: The cowboy builders attempt at a double basin ! Above: Original backdoor and sink and cold water tap. Pig salting bath under the old stairs Badly laid Old “modern” fireplace going! Pig salt bath under stairs and old door to sitting room Old cupboard next to fireplace - sitting room Kitchen window to front of cottage Kitchen Inglenook - signs of subsidence! Outside toilet bricked up New window in large bedroom Work in progress and digging out. Back of cottage - narrow path Rear patio dug out with floor stones from kitchen and my drystone wall. Small son! Two sons - front door!
