I got into it through necessity. We bought a house, got married and moved in. It had to have practically everything done - downstairs floors and joists were rotten/damp and needed replacing as all airbricks had been covered up, damp proofing and plastering all round downstairs, upstairs flooring and a few joists needed replacing because of woodworm, new kitchen, new bathroom, central heating fitted, chimney breast removed right the way through, rewiring, replumbing, new doors, new skirting, new windows, a couple of new ceilings plus a ton of other stuff. Dunno how we got a mortgage on it. We had to live upstairs for a whole year by converting the front bedroom into a living room and a back bedroom as a kitchenette. Bathroom was a basic downstairs extension - quite a trip if you needed to go to the loo in the night as you had to pick your way through a building site. Probably the only things we had specialists in to do was install the heating and do the dampproof injection, everything else was done by myself with the help of a few friends in return for car repairs to their vehicles! Apart from our bed and cooking utensils, everything - carpets, curtains, cooker, three piece suite, table, chairs, you name it were second or third hand. Nowdays, newlyweds after having their £30K wedding and luxurious honeymoon won’t accept anything less than brand new. We had it tough............reminds me of that Monty Python sketch.......
