Anyone here ever owned a really old cottage?

StumpyPumpy wrote: »

That cannot be correct.
According Historic England (the public body that looks after the list) So your Tudor house must have been on the Statutory List unless it had been altered so much as to be nothing like a Tudor house or it wasn't a Tudor house at all. Are you sure you weren't spun some yarn about it when you bought it? Houses often come with a history which as been "embellished" to the point of legend.

In the 1930's Tudor Revival architecture was very popular; it was actually a follow-on to the Arts and Crafts style and tended toward either the black and white half timbered look or the mythical "country cottage" with steep pitched, red tiled roofs (often with tiled dormer windows sticking out of them) and decorated with herringbone brick or rendered wall infills rather than actually having the timber framing bearing the load of the house. The cottages were actually more Jacobean than Tudor, but the Tudor name seemed to stick better for some reason. You only have to look at a 1930's housing estate to see any number of black and white half timbered buildings and twee "country cottages", looking for all the world like a Price Kensington Cottage Ware Tea Set, to see how fashionable the style was.

You say it was dismantled and rebuilt, did you ever have any documentary evidence of this? If that was how it came about and it wasn't a revival house it would be interesting to know where it was originally located and who dismantled it: they must have been extremely wealthy to do so rather than just build a facsimile especially as that was all the rage at the time so there were plenty of people who could do it. There would be records of it happening somewhere, as relocating a building was very rare in the 1930's. There could possibly be a Pathe news reel about it! Did you ever check with your Local History Society about it? It must have been a very impressive building to be worth all the effort.

If you still have the details I'd love to see them and have a bit of a dig around to see what else turns up, I'm usually pretty good at getting to the bottom of things like this, because if it is Tudor and not "officially" on the list, then the current owner could still be bound by listed building consent without actually knowing it and that could bring about a whole world of trouble.

SP

StumpyPumpy wrote: »

Yes I know, I have read the book. I am not suggesting that it wasn't possible to do. But, and it is a big but, the moving of that house was famous whilst she was doing it. It wasn't the writing of the book by her niece that first made people aware of it. 1 Monkey Row was indexed in the National Archive in 1920 and when she was moving it in the 60's/70's it often featured in the press (local and national) to such an extent that people sent her money and frequently wrote to her about it. The press coverage also serves to show how rare an event it was.

The difficulty of doing the move was illustrated in the book by her attempts to get either the RAF or USAF to supply a helicopter to lift the timber frame in one piece to the new site as it was incredibly difficult to separate. In the end it took teams of men to dismantle the frame and was hugely expensive. It needed 11 trips to move all the materials and decades to re-assemble. It gained its own celebrity in its time and all the locals at both locations knew its history. May Savidge was regarded as an eccentric and obsessive which gave her the drive to do all this.

I simply don't see how, in this instance, the same thing could have happened but in secret. I'm not saying it is impossible but with the limited information I have to work on it seems highly improbable. It appears that the locals believe it to be a Tudor Revival house, not a relocation project and, as it is in living memory, you'd expect at least some of them to know. Without contemporaneous documents and witnesses the only person who could really say for sure would be a professional surveyor but (obviously) I'm not going to pay to get a survey done on a house I don't own or want to buy just to satisfy my curiosity:p

Houses often gain a mythology that have no basis in fact. For instance, I can remember my Grandmother telling us about Grandfather trying to dig a bomb shelter in the back garden of their house during the war because they lived quite near to an oil refinery. But, so the story went, he never finished it because he was only doing it during leave from the army (he was stationed on the south coast and was a cook - my family are feeders not fighters). In the end, sick of the hole, she filled it all in with help from the neighbours to make a vegetable plot. He was far from happy when he returned on leave the next time.

It was a frequently told family tale and probably not an uncommon occurrence during the war. Only... In the 1980's they moved to sheltered housing and my Mother arranged the selling of their house and I saw the documentation. They bought the only house they ever owned brand new in 1953. After they died I researched further with the benefit of the papers they had left and as far as I could tell, that house was the only one they ever lived in that even had a garden: during the war they lived in a rented terrace with a yard that still exists today. Why the story was told I'll never know, but without those papers or the benefit of professional or local opinion I'd have forever believed that their house was pre-war. And I'd be wrong.


SP

phoebe1989seb wrote: »

...the historical account written by the grandson of the master builder that removed and rebuilt the property was enough to convince us.

Amarna wrote: »

I've just bought my first property which is 19th century cottage. As a first time buyer it was maybe a bit brave or stupid of me (!) but I wasn't naive, I realised there would be quirks and constant upkeep on a property of such an age.
What I wasn't prepared for was the paranoia (perhaps as a ftb) of everything needing work or going wrong. Random cracks appearing everywhere, doors fitting one day and not the next, patches of damp etc. I seem to be finding lots of little things that need repair, that I never noticed on the two viewings I had. Ive had three surveys done (One buildings survey prior to buying, one for the damp and wood and another by a family friend) and everyone has a different opinion on the severity and the options to repair! It's driving me mad.
What I'm asking really is, what is it like to live in such an old property? Are the above things part of the course? Are there any money saving hacks I should know about when it comes to maintenance?
Thanks!