Hillfoot House

We have been living in our lovely house since the end of April 2012.  We moved from a fairly standard four bedroom detached estate house, built seventeen years ago, at the edges of the Tilehurst suburbs in Reading.  We had a reasonable sized garden for a house on an estate; two single bedrooms and two double bedrooms; and good sized reception rooms and kitchen.  And here we are now, in a four storey six bedroom house, built somewhere around 1737 or earlier, with a large garden.

The house needs work.  We both needed stiff drinks to read the survey thoroughly: and the surveyor himself estimated that we are going to have to spend the price of a small house now, just to get the building up to the standard it should be.  However, nothing is so urgent that we have had to pull out all the stops; we can take our time and perhaps in five years’ time the building will be reaching its full potential.  As the previous owners said, we just need a little imagination and a good bit of money.

With this blog, I hope to keep track of what I manage to find out about the house; how it changes through the seasons, and what changes we make to it.  There are wonderful things to explore and we have so many options – whether to treat the house as a Georgian house, or as a farmhouse (its original purpose) or as a 21st century home with an older skeleton.